> On 10/26/2012 4:36 AM, Graham Lauder wrote: > ... > > > The proposal therefore is to initiate a contest to create this new > > branding, this would have multiple benefits in terms of community > > outreach, marketing and raising brand awareness. > > ... > > Several Apache projects have run logo contests in the past; some were > quite successful both with wide participation and good designs to come > out of them. As noted in many of the comments on this thread, there are > a lot of details to work out, especially if the PMC is looking for a > whole "branding" package of logos, icons, colors, etc. > > - Be clear in your request for submissions. Spend the time to go over > the whole package you plan to put out, since it will get a lot of > interest. Having a good experience for submitters with clear guidelines > on what parts of branding are being sought, and if designs are expected > to be used as-is, or if designs may be modified once selected is important. > > - I'd suggest having a preliminary voting round (primarily community > based), and then a separate runoff round from the top X voted designs > (primarily committer based, with the PMC making final decision). With a > large number of original submissions, it's really hard to get a good > sense of support for each one. Runoffs from the top designs are much > simpler, plus the PMC can use the runoff selection process to promote or > restrict designs the PMC has specific thoughts on.
As I said in the earlier mail, voting is a really bad way to develop a brand and so that shouldn't be happening. Earlier I said to Rob that at the time I couldn't think of a better word than contest, but I'm going to change the title from "contest" to "Brand Development Project". The committers and project members are a miniscule set of our users that don't count as a measurable fraction of a percent and are generally completely atypical relative to our normal customers. They are not the people we are trying to connect with. There was no vote when coca cola devised its brand but you can be sure there was a lot of research amongst customers. We have to get away from the Apache Mindset of Dev community same as Whole Community. We are in a consumer space. 99.9999% of the people who will directly interact with, download and use AOO are not devs they are consumers. Someone said that "But http server has way more users" arrant nonsense. The number of people who make the decision and then download and install Http Server is miniscule by comparison with those who do the same with OOo, Straw man. We will have no runoffs, please read my first mail. The PMCs decision has to be made on specific _objective_ criteria. The subjective will be left to the survey. Note I said survey not vote. The Survey will gauge the customers feelings and reactions and impressions about the various proposals. As part of the RFP we need to decide what those criteria are, such as: Target Market/s Image (That is how we want to be seen by clients: Professional, Friendly, innovative etc etc) Impact (Recognisability, uniqueness, attractiveness) Connection The Survey will not rank it will seek to gain an insight into the customers perceptions of various the branding concepts. Filtering at this end to be done objectively based on the data from the survey. > > The various points on this thread about the community here on ooo-dev@ > versus the actual end-user community are spot on as well. Re-branding a > product with this many millions of end users is important to do > carefully and consistently. Indeed and you can't have both unless you have two brands, do we therefore brand the project and the product separately > > - From the legal standpoint, we will likely need the winning designer to > donate all trademark rights in the design(s) to the ASF explicitly. > Given that we may register new trademarks about AOO, we will need to be > clear on this point. But the details can be handled later, and should > not be difficult, so don't let that get in the way of running the contest! All of those elements will be necessarily covered in the RFP Cheers GL > > - Shane
