In short: dotHIV will apply for the Top-Level-Domain .hiv (like .com or .co.za) and thus establish the “red ribbon” of the Internet. Currently, dotHIV is in the process of collecting funds on the crowdfunding platform indiegogo. You as designers can contribute an original artwork, which will be printed and sent to the donors as a gift.

How does it work, exactly?

jovoto’s contribution?

We will help this initiative by creating wonderful artworks they can use as gifts to supporters of their fundraising campaign and that can be used at fundraising events!

Sign up for the contest here and make sure to read the brief to get the full idea.

precore.net – a community for design portfolios

By a lucky coincident I recently got in touch with a dedicated small German based  creative community that focuses exactly on this subject matter: precore. Do you know it? Precore offers interesting resources by providing a comprehensive list of design universities and colleges in Germany, as well as providing some insights and peer support regarding the application process to these schools. And most of all, precore is about sharing your application portfolios! You can either ask for feedback on your work in progress in the forum or submit it to the gallery of successful application portfolios.

From a successful architecture application portfolio to FH Düsseldrof, by Illemus

What’s your experience with application portfolios?

I  firmly believe in this kind of peer feedback, what better way to prepare for studying design and deciding which uni to go to then by listening to those who have already made it there?

How was your application process? Do you have any insights to share with us about studying design or other artistic/creative studies? What’s it like in other countries?

From a successful design application portfolio to FH Münster, by parsley

From a successful interface design application portfolio to FH Potsdam, by simon.m

People in beta is a celebration of startup culture and this pioneer spirit unique to Berlin. Many of the hot new startups like Gidsy, Amen and Readmill will tell you about their ideas and how they started.

Awesome Foundation Award

The morning will begin with the award ceremony of the awesome foundation: Every other month, a group of trustees (inlcuding jovoto’s Bastian and Nadine) gives out a brown paper bag with 1000,- Euro in cash in it for an awesome project idea. No strings attached! If you have an awesome project you have always wanted to do, please apply here. (Specify Berlin as your chapter)

Betapitch

The day’s highlight is betapitch. Startups do a speed presentation of their business idea to a jury of experienced investors and successful startuppers. The winners get a desk at betahaus for free for a couple of months. It’s a perfect chance to kickstart your idea and make the jump from sideproject to fulltime effort. You can still apply so do it now!

Werewolf Gamez

To relax, you’re invited to visit the jovoto office… it will be kind of dark, kind of spooky… and there will be werewolves on the loose! We read so much about this game the cool kids in Silicon Valley and New York have rediscovered, that we think Berlin needs a refresher course, too. The game is called “Werevolves” and is basically a psychology game of deceit, manipulation and collaboration (hey, something jovotans should be sort of familiar with!). Each player gets assigned a role (citizen, werewolf and some special roles) and then its about figuring out “whodunnit”.

Betajam and Party

Finally, there’s of course going to be a party with beer and music and live bands! Guess what: we have some talented musicians among our team members. Aljoscha and Jaschar will each have their 20minutes of fame (or more) on stage!

This year, our participation is more peripheral, but Bastian and Nadine did make some contributions to SMW11 as part of the advisory board, and of course we ran the lovely “Art: Made by the Crowd” project leading up to the SMW. So, what exactly is going to happen?

Schedule Highlights

Social Media Week is a decentralized event, taking place simultaneously in several cities and with lots of small venues and activities. Topics include social media and politics, crowd-fundig and collaborative consumption, social media analytics and strategy. Check out the full schedule here. All events are free of charge, but may require registration up front!

First off, we recommend (of course!) to stop by the art installation “Praktikum Lab” which is the result of jovoto’s and startnext’s crowd-art experiment.  The installation will be on every day from Monday to Friday at Aufbau Haus, but on Monday, at 7pm, Maya and Yasmina (representing the artists behing the concept), Nadine and Anna (startnext) will introduce the concept and the crowd-generated aspect behind it, at the exhibition venue. Hope to see some of you there!

On Tuesday at about 6pm at Festsaal Kreuzberg , there’s a panel about Community Management. Nadine will attempt her best at telling the audience what it’s like to be a community manager, about the different roles of community management we have established at jovoto and about what the future might bring for community management as an emerging job profile. Also on the Panel are Soundcloud’s David Noel, Nokia’s Surya Santhi and Florian Zühlke of TLGG.

On Thursday at 8pm, Bastian and Nadine are presenting a short intro about the story of the Human Rights Logo at Mashable Salon in Berlin’s Soho House.

On Friday, at last, we’ll enjoy ourselves at a small team BBQ (it also happens to be jovoto’s fourth Birthday!) and at the SMW closing party, at which our dear Jeroen van Boxtel will DJ.

As I said last week jovoto joined the design thinking community for their first community event “better beta“. Design thinking is a method for facilitating human centered innovation and good ideas inside a company (or any project).

She’s a winner:  You_did

As you may recall, we created the better beta logo here at jovoto – an attempt by the organizers of the event to have a community-created conference from the very beginning. To my delight, You_did, (or Judith) who came out with the winning design, could make it to the conference and helped me out during the presentation of the “making of” the better beta logo.

A flash from the past: “Siehaus” and key learnings

The next day was quite busy since I was scheduled to take part as an ‘expert’ in two sessions on “crowdsourcing / virtual collaboration”, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The workshops were structured and moderated by Ahmet Acar who’s a design thinking pro. The aim was to find parallels between the competitive/collaborative ideation process on jovoto and the design thinking process. Can design thinking be transferred into an online environment?

Another nice surprise: One of the participants of the afternoon session turned out to be a jovoto community member whom we haven’t seen in a while,Siehaus, who joined us for Frankfurt Book Fair’s Flying Sparks contest last year. We had a great chat and she told me about a citizen science project that she is currently involved with. It has to do with Berlin’s bird population… and perhaps we will encounter this particular project in an open zone in a few months…

Well, I’m going to have to reflect what I took home from the workshops and discuss it with the rest of the team. But of the top of my head, I guess one of the key learnings was: Design thinkers tend to view the ideation part of a process as “the tip of the iceberg” – most of their work lies in the research, consultation, and reformulation of the challenge brief/question itself.

Well it’s about to take place, this weekend, September 9th and 10th.

The jovoto team will be present with two team members, and we’re invited to host two sessions. The first session will be a “Making of”, explaining how the conference got it’s logo.

In our second session, we’re exploring how methods of design thinking and the collaboration / competition model of jovoto can be seen as related, and how the two concepts can learn from each other.

What is effective collaboration online? How can online- and offline processes be combined? We’re exited to develop some scenarios with the experienced design thinkers at the conference.

Here’s a cute animation video, a playful interpretation of the winner logo:

Click on the image to play on vimeo

Startnext Funding Widget

Winning Concept

The concept that ended up as the “winner” is actually a mash-up of different ideas. The basis for it is _Maya’s submission Now Showing How, placed 2nd in the jovoto ranking, but it also includes elements of AnnaNuthaThang’s Confessions Walland Tyby82′s Wishing Wall.

After finalizing the concept, planning (and replanning) the budget, we’re proud to announce Praktikum Lab!

Discover skills you never know you had or lacked. Find out how much fun it is to teach and learn. Wish for a mentor to teach you something you’ve always wanted to know, confess to a skill that you pretend to have but really don’t.

This is going to be fun!! Please help us make this real, chip in 5 bucks or help by letting others know about it.

Pitch Video

This amazing Video was created by the project’s partner 10LAB.tv. Thanks!

Over on humanrightslogo.net, the past days have been buzzing with activity! On Sunday, July 31st, midnight GMT+2 the submission phase ended.

You can imagine that it was quite a logistical challenge to coordinate across timezones, with thousands of members signing on and trying to upload at the same time… but of course, in the end, we made it!

With this little infographic, we tried to visualize what the deadline means for dfferent timezones...

The official count of ideas now, after even the last postal submission has been inlcuded, is…

15,372!

Pretty impressive, huh??

Now dear community we would like to invite you to browse and rate ideas. Many more likes are needed, and it is actually fun to browse the proposals from all over the world.

Filtering for the Top300 or the Expert’s Recommendations can help you if you’re in a rush and you want to see which ideas already have found approval. But of course it is equally important to look at latecomer ideas.

Despite the community preferring designs that focus on showing the characteristic swirly tail of protei, or breaking down its function of separating oil out of water, the protei team chose Romko’s paper boat.

The chosen design

Origami Paper Ship, by Romko

This may come as a surprise, but makes sense if you think of protei as a constantly evolving, growing, smart boat which may have had its humble origins as a small paper boat, folded and set into a stream to test how fast the current is going. Maybe we could think of the paper boat as protei’s embryo state?

OK, maybe I’m getting carried away here. The paper boat it is, congratulations Romko! You’re fairly new to jovoto, and as far as I know this was your first submission. An excellent debut.

The short list

To make things as transparent as possible, I can show you the shortlist the protei team used as the basis for their decision.

Big thank-yous and a lot of praise about your professionalism and nice comunity attitude comes your way from Rotterdam – I hope you have enjoyed learning about protei.

To be able to give out the Prizes (T-shirts) to those ranked 1-6 we will have to wait until they are available… hang tight.

No client, no rules, no strings attached. Let your ideas run wild and come up with an artistic intervention along this topic: “Friend, Foe, Fan, Follower and everything in between. How is the internet changing the way we think about relationships and ‘the others’, and what does this mean for self-perception and interaction?” Make sure to read the briefing here.

What’s it for?

We have been wanting to do this experiment for a while: Can we facilitate a true crowd-made artwork? Can ‘art’ be created collaboratively, funded collectively and ejoyed together?

To find out, we have teamed up with crwodfunding platform starnext for this project we call Art: Made by the Crowd. In the 3 Week concept phase on jovoto, you submit concepts, give each other feedback, team up and improve your ideas. During the 4 Weeks funding phase on Startnext, the concept rated highest by you, the participants, will get help from 2010LAB.tv in producing a pitch video and we will put all our efforts into raising the necessary funds to make the concept become reality.

The goal is to present the artwork during Social Media Week in Berlin, Sept. 19th – 23rd.

Who can participate?

Everyone! You don’t need to be an artist by profession. But you need a good concept, you should be sure you can pull it off! You can also participate by reviewing, rating and giving feedback to the proposed concepts.