[Ayatana] Community Artwork and Lessons learned from Gaia10

[Saleel Velankar <svelanka@xxxxxxxxx>]

I did some some kde plasma themeing for/with gaia10 this summer (link),
 and am pleased to note that this years gaia project, which makes art to
 raise awareness of climate change, has been very successful in the 
amount/quality of art it has produced. I think there are lessons here 
that were new to me, which may not be so new for you, that were worth 
learning for community artwork. Broadly I can split these up into 3 
groups: Gather, Incubate, Release.

Gathering
 artists is a tricky business, clearly you want a good level of skill 
present, but you also want to attract any old fool like myself that 
happens to be clicking around looking for a project to contribute to. 
Also you want to have a place where artwork can be quickly uploaded and 
discussed without artificial limits such as editing a wiki, or forum 
limits on image size. One of the interesting things that Marius, the 
curator of this year’s project, did was to target the deviant art 
customization community, which is huge and is generally game for such 
things. By setting up a group that spelled out the vision of this years 
project (more on this later) he gained a lot of eyeballs. But by 
actually hosting the project off deviantart he essentially created a 
level of abstraction that made only interested parties sign up. He also 
contacted very skilled artists directly and asked them to contribute, 
not to the forums or the community part but rather to the finished 
release directly. Lessons learned by me: 
1. Trust the skilled artists and give them lots of freedom to create things. 
2. Create a small level of abstraction to slightly filter the community.
3. Create and establish working relationships with successful digital artists.

Incubating
 the project. Marius essentially laid out a strong vision of how he felt
 the gaia widgets should look and feel across the different platforms. 
It was unique and in many circumstances impossible to do. But the 
community responded by either making mockups of their own, or starting 
to port the vision as best they could on their platforms. A couple of 
things to note that I feel were important: the community was actively 
asked/encouraged to not post the work/screenshots outside the forum. 
Secrecy was not enforced afaik, but implied and encouraged. I thought 
that this was important. having sites like omg swoop in and report on 
halfbaked ideas and plans is destructive. The second thing I would like 
to add is that there was some really good critiquing to be found in the 
wallpaper sections etc. The interesting thing was that the artists 
sometimes did refuse certain critique if it didn’t fit their vision. 
What tools the artists used were mostly up to them, and no particular 
set of tools was encouraged.
Lessons learned:
1. Trust the community, do not enforce too many rules

ex: wallpapers just had to above a certain size, no other rules.

2. Encourage secrecy outside, encourage sharing inside (resources/mockups)
3. Allow the good ideas to float up through critique.
4. Set a strong vision, and have one person who is (artist+coder) in charge

The
 project is still being released, with new stuff being added to the 
gallery as time allows. And its important to note that the deadline was 
pushed back atleast twice to make sure that everything was ready.And 
when I mean release I do not mean making a package and adding it to the 
repos. Take a look at how the art is being showcased, with its own slick
 site, along with previews and with interview with those trusted top 
artists. The group on DA is accepting screenshots of people using this 
stuff, so they can be featured. etc. The eyeballs that were gathered on 
facebook/deviantart/twitter are now the ones that are spreading the 
work.
Lessons learned:
1. Release when its ready and not according to a deadline
2. Release loudly, hit the social networks
3. Involve the general public in using the work, and spreading it.

Now
 a lot of what I have typed is probably oldhat for the people on this 
list, but this is the part where I attempt to look at how we can use 
these lessons in making some great community artwork for Natty. I think 
we have a good deal of artists currently using ubuntu/linux that would 
love to contribute to community themeing. Unfortunately since the 
genesis of this list the ubuntu-art list is essentially dead. By moving 
the wallpaper stuff to flickr, we have involved the general public, but 
not necessarily the artist subcommunity. 

Why
 do we limit our community artwork just to ubuntu?  This is silly. Arch 
or Suse or others also use the same programs that can use this artwork. 
(wallpapers/themes) we should try to publish our community artwork as 
not just a deb, but also a native package format to be used by those 
distributions. Having our artwork being available on their systems, 
generates goodwill towards us and helps draw more eyeballs, and possibly
 more artists. The community will port this stuff anyways, lets use and 
feature it. Linux remains the only platform that gives a great deal of 
freedom in the way gui can be customized (themeing windows/mac is a 
nightmare.)

Why
 don’t we use the forums? Also silly. Google a linux problem and 8 times
 out of 10 a UF response will be at the top. There are a lot of 
knowledgeable people there. Lets use something like these forums to 
incubate our projects instead of the wiki/mailing lists, which are full 
of limitations. We already have a kickass ubuntu-artists group in 
deviantart, and we could easily create a new group for community artwork
 much in the same way as gaia (not for contributions, but for eyeballs)

When
 we have done stuff in the past, we havent pushed it hard across the 
ecosystem. Lets the push the results of the community-artwork across 
social networks. Take the kickass wallpapers that came through the 
flickr group. While these aren’t community wallpapers, I see no mention 
of them on the mainsite. (Although I did see them on the design blog, so
 kudos there.) 

I
 have typed a lot more than I planned to, and if you read this I thank 
you for it. I think its time we start looking at making and publishing 
community artwork that will really shine. Also first post to the list. 
(woot!) I would post this to the old list but I really think we need 
someone to set the direction and get the ball rolling. I rather like the
 idea of having an overarching idea/cause to focus our community art on.

-- 
Saleel