Open Stack

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

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





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