Open Stack

On Thu, 2017-02-16 at 19:54 +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2017-02-16 14:09:53 -0500 (-0500), Dan Prince wrote:
> [...]
> > This isn't about aligning anything. It is about artistic control.
> > The
> > foundation wants to have icons their way playing the "community
> > card"
> > to make those who had icons they like conform. It is clear you buy
> > into
> > this.
> > 
> > Each team will have its own mascot anyway so does it really matter
> > if
> > there is some deviation in the mix? I think not. We have a mascot
> > we
> > like. It even fits the general requirements for OpenStack mascots
> > so
> > all we are arguing about here is artistic style really. I say let
> > the
> > developers have some leverage in this category... what is the harm
> > really?
> 
> [...]
> 
> You're really reading far too much conspiracy into this. Keep in
> mind that this was coming from the foundation's marketing team, and
> while they've been very eager to interface with the community on
> this effort they may have failed to some degree in explaining their
> reasons (which as we all know leaves a vacuum where conspiracy
> theories proliferate).
> 
> As I understand things there are some pages on the
> foundation-controlled www.openstack.org site where they want to
> refer to various projects/teams and having a set of icons
> representing them was a desire of the designers for that site, to
> make it more navigable and easier to digest. They place significant
> importance on consistency and aesthetics, and while that doesn't
> necessarily match my personal utilitarian nature I can at least
> understand their position on the matter. Rather than just words or
> meaningless symbols as icons they thought it would be compelling to
> base those icons on mascots, but to maintain the aesthetic of the
> site the specific renderings needed to follow some basic guidelines.
> They could have picked mascots at random out of the aether to use
> there, but instead wanted to solicit input from the teams whose work
> these would represent so that they might have some additional
> special meaning to the community at large.
> 
> As I said earlier in the thread, if you have existing art you like
> then use that in your documentation, in the wiki, on team tee-shirts
> you make, et cetera. The goal is not to take those away. This is a
> simple need for the marketing team and foundation Web site designers
> to have art they can use for their own purposes which meets their
> relatively strict design aesthetics... and if that art is also
> something the community wants to use, then all the better but it's
> in no way mandatory. The foundation has no direct control over
> community members' choices here, nor have they attempted to pretend
> otherwise that I've seen.

And there is that rub again. There is implied along with this pressure
to adopt the new logo. If you don't you'll get a blank space as a sort
of punishment for going your own way. As Monty said directly... they
want conformance and cohesion over team identity.

Read the initial replies on this thread. Almost every single person
besides (Flavio and Monty) preferred to keep the original TripleO
mascot. Same thing on the Ironic thread as far as I can tell (those
devs almost all initially preferred the old mascot before they were
talked out of it.). And then you wore them down. Keep asking the same
question again and again and I guess over time people stop caring.

Its all just silliness really. Why the foundation got involved in this
mascot business to begin with and didn't just leave it to the
individual projects.

And again. Not a great time to be talking about any of this. My sense
of urgency is largely based on the fact that Emilien sent out an
official team stance on this. I wasn't part of that... so apologies for
being late to this conversation.

Dan