Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Logo/mascot competition

On Monday 15 Nov 2010 21:25:24 David Nelson wrote:
> Hi list, :-)
>
> I'm really happy to have started up the contact with Ubuntu Artwork,
> and very grateful for the kind and positive response from John Baer,
> Shane Fagan and others.
>
> @TDF guys: I'd like to make one last plea for my idea of a logo/mascot
> competition (if you have clear arguments against it, I'll drop the
> subject). IMHO, the advantages of organizing a competition are this:
>
> 1) By sourcing ideas from the world at large, we can accumulate a
> large range of choices. It worked for OOo's Otto the seagull, it can
> work for us. From the little contact-building I've been doing, I can
> feel there's a large number of artists that would respond. We could
> really develop some superb branding.

Otto the Seagull was a different use case, it was aimed at kids getting 
involved with their learning and the INGOTs initiative and kids love 
competitions, but their attention ceases once the winners and losers are 
defined.  It did nothing in terms of building the OOo Art community.  Sell the 
community first then source the brand from the community in a collaborative 
rather than competitive manner. 

A collaborative community effort would come up with branding as superb as 
anything sourced from a competition.  For a start, people involved with the 
project understand the philosophies and the dynamics of the community and 
particularly with this community, it's vast diversity  

> 2) It would be a good opportunity for publicizing the TDF/LibO
> project. I have lots of ideas and energy for this, and I'm sure we can
> get the Web buzzing about us again. It could be developed into a
> superb marketing opportunity.

A short term gain at the expense of long term health of the community.  

Instead let's publicise the fact that the LibreO art community is about to 
take on a huge branding exercise and anyone wanting to get involved is 
welcome.  It seems to me that much of your outreach activities have been doing 
this in any case, just with a very narrow focus.

> 3) We can certainly attract quite a few new contributors to the LibO
> project, in artwork/marketing and in other areas. And we can
> demonstrate our commitment to openness, community-building and
> meritocracy.

Again history at OOo has shown us that this does not happen and in fact causes 
the reverse.  When the community sees significant input into the project 
handed off to people who have no history or connection to the project they 
become frustrated and leave.  Competitions enhance a winners and losers 
mentality.

By comparison promoting the Art project part of the community engages people 
with the community which then collaborates on the branding and in the end the 
LibreO Art community wins not just an individual,  

> 4) We can capitalize on the contact we've made with Ubuntu Artwork; if
> they're willing, they can "foster" us in this to some extent, and LibO
> participants can learn and develop a lot of good workflow methods and
> practices from an experienced and successful "big brother" project. It
> will also develop and strengthen this new relationship.


Ubuntu is small brother compared to where we have come from.  Ubuntu's 
userbase is miniscule in comparison to OOo.  We can learn from OOo and the 
mistakes made there.  Ubuntu makes the same mistakes as OOo did:  A corporate 
design department doing all the significant design work and making all of the 
decisions while feeding scraps to the community.  

> 5) By doing this in some kind of "association" (to be defined) with
> Ubuntu, there can be beneficial publicity for both projects. And for
> the FOSS world in general. FOSS projects need to work together, and we
> need to breakdown some of the "ideology" splits and barriers that have
> been such a negative brake to widespread adoption and development of
> FOSS. This is a good way to promote that kind of positive thinking. We
> can work the Inkscape and Gimp projects into this. *Everyone* comes
> out a winner.

The LibO/OOo/Go-ooo/Symphony universe does not suffer the "ideology split", we 
all exist across multiple platforms.  It could in fact be argued that 
following Ubuntu would entrench these  "ideology splits".

I agree to a point with the concept of outreaching to other Art communities, 
such as the KDE (http://kde-look.org/) and Gnome (http://art.gnome.org/) art 
projects to get more people involved in the LibreO Art project. 
However a competition does nothing to foster this.  In a competition, 
especially when it involves something as aesthetic and therefore subjective, 
as Art, the end result is the majority are losers and there is only one winner 
and it is not the community. 

My perception is that you have a negative view of our Art community.  A real 
positive view would say that the LibreO Art community has the strength to 
deliver on a brilliant branding and has the distinct advantage of ownership 
and being part of the wider LibreO community, certainly given the present 
proposals on the wiki, it would seem that way.  


Cheers
GL

-- 
Graham Lauder,
OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html

OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.

INGOTs Assessor Trainer
(International Grades in Open Technologies)
www.theingots.org

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