Fedora and Data Portability Logos, too similar for comfort. (image via Techcrunch)
Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.
The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.
Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.
The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.
The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:
“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”
Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.
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