[Clipart] OOo contest

[Nicu Buculei (OCAL)]

Jon Phillips wrote:
> 
> 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

OOo is a *huge* project, so you will find there a lot of people with 
very different ideas and attitudes.

About having their own clipart, I guess they can't say in public: OOo 
sucks by not being able to use SVG clipart from OCAL so we have to 
reinvent the wheel.
As for worldlabel.com, I guess $5000 is cheap for the publicity received 
from this move.

> 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 have backed out from a lot of OOo areas (marketing, art, website) but 
still have contacts, read some lists and still I am the co-lead of the 
Romanian subproject.

AFAIK Daniel is on vacancy, in a trip around Europe, and may not read 
email. Lately he works more on OpenDocument but is still active on OOo.

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

I am suprised, I know him for year from the various OOo mailing list and 
have a positive opinion about him.
The email address is grsingleton AT openoffice DOT org

> 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.

10,000 templates and 5,000 clipart until 13 October seems to me a very 
ambitious goal (may I say impossible?).

> 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

Now their contest is announced on the project front page: 
http://www.openoffice.org/

> I think the best strategy is:
> 
> 1.) we should push even harder to move over to our user-friendly ccHost

Indeed, for about one year our project was crawling and probably we 
missed some opportunities.

> 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!)

Ask me about contacts :p
For example I think you may talk with Bernhard Dippold (bernhard AT 
familie-dippold DOT de), he recently took the initiative to propose the 
enhancement of the OOo Art project as a stand-alone project, as opposed 
to the current status as a subproject of Marketing (there are a lot of 
politics involved). If the proposals is appoved by a bureaucratic group 
named the Community Council, probably Bernhard will be the lead of the 
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

As said above, OOo is huge, usually the left hand does not know what the 
right hand do.

> 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).

Abiword? I think there is a big chance for OOo to get a kick in the 
balls from it, as Abiword is already ported to platforms where OOo does 
not stand any chance, like OLPC and Nokia 770.

> 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.

Indeed, we better blog about our accomplishments.

> 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...

We talked about contests in the past and I am very supportive of the 
idea. But we have first to complete the ccHost migration.

> 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.

I think we can find a lot of creative ideas for prizes.

-- 
nicu
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/