@tosho Keep an eye here on the hub, this is where the announcement will be posted (possibly as a link to @nhaines blog).
@meetdilip See the full requirements here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase
but yes, from that wiki page: “Our target resolution is 3840 x 2400”.
It’s only waned since Iain stepped down, to be fair.
My “criticisms” of the current approach are well known, so I’ll avoid repeating them all.
But, to surmise, the main issues are:
“Free culture showcase” means little to most people. 'The FCS is open" = people asking (“Is it showing me a showcase, or telling me about one? And why do I care about a showcase? And free culture? What is that…”)
Sure, pinning the news in the usual echo chambers is useful, but those aren’t usually the sort of places where creative types — and the wallpaper side is a contest about creativity remember — loiter.
Finally, Flickr is the not a barrier to submission. The most recent Ubuntu Budgie wallpaper contest used Flickr but managed to solicit more entries than the FCS for 17.10.
The reason interest has waned is waned is down to poor organisation and poor promotion of the contest.
Hey @d0od, do you have any specific forward looking, positive suggestions for how we could revamp the project? Nothing is off the cards, lets see what we can do to make this a success, without dwelling on mis-steps of the past?
I sure do have “specific forward looking, positive suggestions”, though what follows only applies to the wallpaper side of things.
It’s succinct, to the point, and parseable at a glance. It instantly tells whoever comes across it that “this is a participatory thing”. It’s will also be familiar to those who’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time. I do get e-mails asking why Ubuntu doesn’t have a wallpaper contest any more…
Pinning a topic in /r/ubuntu is useful, but go bigger and promote the contest beyond the orange bubble.
Let Linux blogs know the contest is on, when it launches, what the deadline is, but also reach out to photography blogs and groups on Google+. Get them to share the details with their members; get Ubuntu to promote it on their social media channels for greater reach.
The aim should be to promote the contest to a diverse and varied set of people, not just existing Ubuntu contributors.
And, above all else, continue to bang the drum during the contest. Many potential entrants will forget about it after the initial hype so do keep reminding them (e.g., ‘1 week left’, ‘final 24 hours’. etc 
The longer the list of bullets points, the more of a hassle it seems. The criteria has been recycled and added to since Iain was in charge. I’d condense it down into “three core rules” or something — and don’t, on a wiki page, tell people to ‘find more information’ on the wiki without linking to said wiki page. Group/merge some of the points together (e.g., resolution and file size; license and ownership, etc) to make the rules more digestible.
One thing i’ve always noticed: the wiki and photo pools often omit the deadline. That’s an important bit of information people will want to know.
Jane SIlber and Barton George helped to select the most recent set (!) which wasn’t known until after. It’s motivating to know who your snaps will be appealing to (especially if those people are notable/well known) are involved. It humanises the contest.
Related to the above point, but it’d be nice if designers/people with expertise in creative subjects were involved. Ubuntu still has designers. Perhaps ask if any would like to be involved in the selection process? Like ‘named’ people it lends a level of seriousness.
A big participatory contest needs a big celebratory climax. A bit of public exposure for the winning artists will help them feel it was worth their time getting involved, while those who don’t take part will be still be interested to know the outcome too (and seeing people get a public thanks will make them more likely to take part next time).
Limiting the number submissions each user makes is still a good idea as it forces people to assess their own work.
The idea mentioned above about introducing categories sounds like a great suggestion. It would broaden the subject matter and, with categories like ‘technology’ and ‘space’ broaden the appeal to entrants who might otherwise thing their subject matter wouldn’t suit.
Very well written Joey! +1
Alan: If you could reach out to the Unsplash community, that would awesome. There’s info here: https://unsplash.com/license
That’s the “secret” .
As an addition to above, we can also talk about the “price”.
The “price” is that the wallpaper will be the default in Ubuntu for five years. The most popular Linux Operating System used by millions of users worldwide.
I like that idea, but Flickr doesn’t allow it. And since reading the rules seems to be rarer than I’d like, if I don’t restrict the submissions to 2, I get 1-6 photos per person and occasionally someone will post an illustration 10 times with different texturing or color gradients.
Policing copyright licensing already takes up the vast amount of my time, so we’d have to figure out an automated way to allow this.
Why don’t you open the contest here in the hub? The participants can upload a small version of their artwork here, and link to the full resolution file wherever they want to host it. We can all vote with likes, and we can all help flagging the entries that don’t follow the rules. The top post can be an index to quickly browse through the different pieces in the thread.
…and ‘Likes’ would be votes on each. 
Is there a way to get notified when the submissions will officially be open?
Oops, thought I replied to this, but I guess I imagined it! 
The problem with holding the contest in the hub is that it turns a lot of automatic things (title, artist name, license, submission limits, etc.) to manual processes. And then there’s no real way to ensure that the full images continue to be hosted in the future. (Flickr isn’t a guarantee either–artists can remove images or their accounts, or Flickr could disappear like SoundCloud’s groups feature did.)
Your best bet is probably to watch this post. I’ll update it with an announcement when the submission period opens.
I’m sure many people in this thread, many who’ve raised some (valid) points regarding the direction, branding and promotion of the “showcase” would appreciate a bit more transparency and/or communication about the “showcase” this cycle. It’s helpful to know if our feedback has been of any use to you and/or if there are other areas/plans we can provide feedback on.
I assume, rightly i’m sure, that you asked for feedback to help change/improve the contest, not just run it ‘as-was’ once again.
Any task of gathering feedback and suggestions will feel more inclusive, collaborative and useful if everyone is kept somewhat informed about how you plan to run the “showcase” this cycle.
Just my 2¢.
I am hoping for more feedback, and I don’t like to interject constantly while receiving feedback, because it can come across as nitpicky. I do hope that we can improve things, but licensing (among other things) remains a substantial issue.
I’ll use you as a volunteer for nitpicking, because you gave very concrete suggestions.
“Please submit your Creative Commons-licensed music to the Ubuntu Wallpaper Contest” is problematic. The Free Culture Showcase is more than just wallpapers, and it would be counterproductive to limit the name during the 18.04 LTS cycle.
Each category can be branded in more specific ways, but it doesn’t make any sense to call a video or music contest a wallpaper contest.
This is a fantastic idea, and that is why I have been doing exactly that. But each media outlet must decide for themselves whether or not it is newsworthy or relevant for them. Certain photography groups have promoted the wallpaper contest in certain cycles and not others. Some Ubuntu blogs have a specific policy to not report on community events, and I have honored those decisions when the became clear by no longer submitting to them.
Interested Ubuntu community members can certainly contribute by submitting the contest to various photographic, video, and musical communities as opportunities for exposure. This is probably one of the best ways that non-artists can directly contribute.
This is a definite area in need of improvement, and I think a longer submission period will afford better opportunities to do so without spamming resources every week.
As for updating the rules and criteria, that’s something I think will be useful. When I took over the contest from Iain, I felt I needed to keep the same structure. One of the biggest barriers to Ubuntu (or any Free culture) submission is feeling empowered to make changes. It’s funny, because I regularly tell others about this, but I still didn’t feel confident to make unilateral changes.
It’s clear from others that since I’m organizing things, I am empowered to make necessary changes. So I’ll be looking at the FCS wiki page again, although ironically since we want video and audio submissions for the LTS cycle, this increases complexity. So I’ll be looking at getting down to the essence of things.
This was not suggested to me until after the submissions had begun, and confirmation didn’t come until after the submission period had ended. It seemed to me that it was more valuable to make this change then to not solicit their feedback because it hadn’t been announced. And that’s the difficult balancing point between transparency and the ability to seize opportunities as they come up.
I agree. The Ubuntu Design team pools together and jointly returns one slate of recommendations.
I agree, and that’s why I do just that, and link to the results on various places such as the Flickr photo pool. I have some control over /r/Ubuntu, which is why that becomes a pinned topic. Other places are out of my control and can only have links submitted to them.
This cycle, due to an enormous number of other changes and news items swirling around Ubuntu 17.10, I deemed it better to add the Free Culture Showcase to the launch announcements in a staggered fashion. It will probably work out better to announce winners before the 18.04 LTS release as is usual. The announcement had to wait until the wallpapers were packaged, however, which contributed to the announcement timing.
I agree–I love the suggestion, but there is no technical way to accomplish this at the moment. So what would really help are suggestions that could lead to supplementing or replacing Flickr for wallpapers, and we also need to worry about song and video submissions as well. Time is very limited after the submission window closes, so the more we can address particular requirements during media submission, the more likely we can make dramatic changes.
As for publicity, I do the best I can but I still depend on the broader community to help spread the word as far and wide as possible.
Your post was a great example of specific ideas for improvement. In fact, most of those ideas are already implemented with varying degrees of success. But bullet point concepts and further explanations for why the suggester thinks they would be useful is one of the best ways to contribute. In addition, others can feel free to take those suggestions and provide ideas for how to implement them.
I hope to hear even more suggestions over the next month as I evaluate what improvements can be made for 18.04 and which can be made for future cycles. At the moment, I’m still in listening mode.
If we have a gallery plugin for Discourse, we can use it host the submissions.
Remember to make the license requirement very obvious this time 
What about having three contests?
It’s in the name of the contest, it’s in the contest announcement, it’s in the results announcement, it’s on the wiki page, it’s in the rules, it’s in the Flickr group rules that you must read and click through to join the group before you can submit any photos…
I monitor submissions and send out form letters about once a week that have explanations about each license and why they are inappropriate (this is also posted to the group discussions list). To my surprise, I’ve only had one angry response this last cycle–all the rest have been positive. But the number of people who still say “oh, I didn’t know anything about Creative Commons” is still disappointing.
So I’m hoping to maintain or decrease the effort with any changes made. I’m not looking to increase the work involved.
The three categories were already submitted and judged separately. If we want to rename the competition, that’s something we could certainly look at.
I don’t know that the name is the problem. No one should be stumbling across the name with no context.
I do start to wonder if it would be better to have music and video submissions posted here with links to SoundCloud or Vimeo. We could require a license statement in the post, and it would make up for limitations in groups on those services.
The biggest problem is that there isn’t much time to try and hunt down original media files from submitters once the contest ends. Flickr lets one download the original images, so that’s a timesaver.
One thing I noticed is some designers mentioning they use proprietary tools to do their designs (ie) Adobe products. Obviously they’re not using Ubuntu or even Linux if using those tools.
I’m wondering if this community cares about that - In that Open Source Tools be used (ie) GIMP, Inkscape etc.? I find it a little ironic that the designers wouldn’t use Linux tools.
I know some Linux communities care about these things, as I do personally. Might be a reason why those designers don’t know about Creative Commons Licensing. Any designer I’ve ever known that uses OSS design tools know those licenses. Just a thought.