[Clipart] OOo contest

[Jon Phillips]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:12 +0200, Peter Mathijssen wrote:
> With grapics from OCAL.
> 
> http://documentation.openoffice.org/
> 
> Peter

Yes, OO.o did a very uncommunity-friendly thing yesterday by launching
this contest with worldlabel.com and deciding to "rather have [their]
own" clip art contest/collection:

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/09/19/1753213&from=rss#discuss

(anyone want to leave a comment on this article ;)

I wrote a pretty direct email last night (and I'm glad I didn't send it)
to the head of worldlabel.com who I have been talking with and who
initiated this contest with OO.o. He apologized to me for how this
contest has turned out and the press release taking this negative
community tone...we have been talkign off and on for about 6 months, so
this came as a bit of a shock to see this now...

Does anyone on this project still work with OO.o? Nicu? Daniel? 

I would like to get in contact with this person Singleton to discuss
this "go-it-alone" strategy.

My first reaction is that this will harm our community, but then I
realized that it is not very practical for OO.o to take on this type of
strategy when their goal is to create an office suite. Also, our
community is after a different goal altogether: to create a public
domain collection of SVG clip art. Thus, their contest looks to take
anything, but without the interface nor the focus of our project, nor
the good community.

I looked at the OO.o site and found it hard to find any reference to
this contest nor a link to our project, like we had originally had with
OO.o. However, it is good to see they link to us and use our clip art
for their project and also refer to us on their template page:
http://documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/index.html

I think the best strategy is:

1.) we should push even harder to move over to our user-friendly ccHost

2.) get back on track for monthly or quarterly releases to raise our
pro-community presence (including press releases) (and plan out the next
6 releases on our roadmap)

3.) write up howtos on the wiki on how to use our collection with
different apps. Also, we should look at how we can better be used by
apps like Open Office. Ryan and Theresa, this would be a great new box
we could add to our wiki: Working with Applications and then have in it
OpenOffice.org, Inkscape.org, Gimp, Scribus, Microsoft Office, etc. What
do you think?

4.) track down contacts in OO.o (and other projects) to support our
project (I find it nearly impossible to find anyone in this project!)

I must admit that I'm very concerned with how the OO.o project runs
projects like this and how they really are harming the community by not
working with the community. I for one have stopped using OO.o (since
last summers desktopcon.org and a big discussion on supporting a more
pro-community office app) and hope that we can either get some
connections in this project to open it up, or push for something else
(this might be more of personal endeavour).

Anyway, enough drama for today! I don't really want to blog about this
nor spin their project as I don't think its our project's way, nor do I
want to give press to this project whether good or bad.

However, it is nice of Russell from worldlabel.com to offer to sponsor a
project for our community after this contest with OO.o is done. We
should brainstorm and get some ideas for a contest up...ccHost has the
ability to run automated contests. What about: holiday card contest,
coloring book, sample book...

Rather than give out cash to people like this OO.o seems to be doing, I
think more beneficial to make books which can be printed at lulu.com and
give the top contributors, or highest rated clip art artists copies of
the book, but include a certain number of people in the book...so that
we don't get confused with $$$ and some new goal other than collecting
great clip art.

Thoughts?

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

San Francisco, CA
USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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Inkscape (http://inkscape.org)
Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org)
Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org)
San Francisco Art Institute (www.sfai.edu)