TL;DR: If you don’t want a mascot, you don’t have to. But Nova, you’ll be 
missed. :-)

A few notes following up on Matt Riedemann, Clint Byrum, Daniel Berrange’s 
conversation regarding the Nova mascot…

Nova doesn’t have to have a mascot if the majority of the team doesn’t want 
one. I’m not sure if the Nova community took a vote or if it was more of an 
informal discussion. We have 53 projects with confirmed logos, and we’re 
planning some great swag associated with the new project mascots. (I’m 
surprised the Nova team didn’t immediately request a star nova as their mascot. 
I’ll give you three guesses what Swift picked...)

I’m not a fan of mandatory fun in any organization. Our intent was to give 
projects design resources and create a logo family. This particularly benefits 
smaller and lesser-known projects (many PTLs were thankful for design 
resources) and is something visual for promoting a project on the website, 
Summit, etc.

Daniel wrote, "It also ends up creating new problems that we then have to spend 
time on for no obviously clear benefit. eg we're ging to have to collect list 
of proposed mascots, check them with legal to make sure they don't clash with 
mascots used by other software companies with squadrons of attack lawyers, then 
arrange voting on them. Even after all that we'll probably find out later that 
in some culture the mascot we've chosen has negative connotations associated 
with it. All this will do nothing to improve life for people who actually 
deploy and use nova, so its all rather a waste of time IMHO.”

HJ: The process we laid out at openstack.org/project-mascots 
<http://openstack.org/project-mascots> doesn’t involve lawyers at all (it’s 
just me, Todd Morey, and some friendly illustrators). We asked projects for a 
list of candidates mainly in case two projects wanted the same animal (in some 
cases, we flipped a coin; in others, one or both projects changed their 
candidate). Most projects quickly collaborated & decided with an etherpad or a 
Condorcet poll. The parameters on mascots (no humans, human-made objects, or 
proper nouns) helped avoid cultural conflicts. We felt “nature” as a category 
is global, neutral, and relatable.

Will giving projects a logo improve life for people who actually deploy and use 
Nova? Maybe not next month. But the purpose of our project overall is give 
projects greater visibility in the community and a stronger identity, which can 
in turn attract more development talent and support a cohesive team…and teams 
ultimately make life better for people who deploy and use Nova. 

I’m here at OpenStack Days Silicon Valley today and just spent an hour talking 
with someone about a certain brand in our community that gets a lot of 
attention—people want that sticker on their laptops. I’m doing my best to make 
your project’s logo worthy of a place on your laptop!


Cheers,
Heidi Joy

______
Heidi Joy Tretheway
Senior Marketing Manager, OpenStack Foundation
503 816 9769  |  skype: heidi.tretheway





__________________________________________________________________________
OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev

Reply via email to