I’m happy to say, boy was everyone impressed with the Make The Global Skin Visible project.

Our client was so happy with your submissions that they even gave us a statement to post for you guys!

“Here is a summary of our teaser contest for all who participated and those who came across the global skin right now. The teaser contest was just the beginning!

A very successful beginning, as we think. With enthusiasm, we have followed daily the ideas submitted and their developments and where happy not only about the high number of participations, but of course, particularly about the high level of creativity! There were strong ideas and coherent realizations to admire.

We were also impressed by the straightforward and constructive cooperation with jovoto. The community idea appeared absolutely convincingly.

Also at the film festival Sehsüchte in Berlin, where some of the clips have been shown in the framework program of the “Sustainability Day”, the feedback was consistently positive.

And that`s how we will proceed: We will upload the Winning-Clips on the highly frequented Swiss news portal 20 Minuten Online and then ask the user community to participate by voting with the question “What is your favorite teaser for the global skin?”.

Furthermore, we integrate the clips in our online and offline communications.

And for sure, we proceed with our video contest! Now, for who took a fancy to it, shall participate! We are offering prizes for a total of $ 25,000! We look forward to hearing your ideas!”

Thanks to the global skin for the positive feedback and the fun and exciting project!

And we can’t forget to congratulate the 3 community prize winners:

voto & sandglas with inwoolve yourself!

MSTR with Shirtheads – Skin and Shirts

kuesti with Und was trägst du? What do you wear?

As well as the other additional 8 licensed ideas!

Great job guys, this was a tough task and you pulled it off!

Today is a big day for the Coca-Cola Design+ Award!

Out of 443 submitted design concepts in the Coca-Cola Design+ Award, 24 submissions made it to the Jury short list. Then experts chose the 3 most outstanding ideas in the categories design, user-friendliness and environment.

At a press conference held in Berlin, the Jury members just announced the winners of the Jury prizes.

And the moment we’ve all been curiously awaiting:

Winning the Jury prize for design: Entwurfreich with WAVE

Winning the Jury prize for user-friendliness: petko255 with ERGO LINE

Winning the Jury prize for sustainability: ibdesign with techno box

And winning the community prize: Elina with Colashell

Congratulations to all & thank you again to all participants for making this contest a success!

We want to know what you think about the new Hidden Rank Feature- Feedback, opinions, suggestions & praise would be appreciated.

So please share with us!

.. but we did say, feed-BACK.

Hey there jovotan,

When uploading your idea or looking through the submissions in the Your Next Job project, have you noticed the new evaluation questions?

We thought that if everyone had just a couple of direct questions to answer & explain their submissions we could build  a base for a more comprehensive and full understanding of your each idea.

If you can answer these questions, which can change depending on the task & project, it’ll be a better measure of “on-briefness” and how your idea is different from someone else’s.

So what’s exactly changing?

If you go to a project where the hidden ranks feature is enabled you’ll find this message in the rating box. You can still vote normally, but you won’t see the average rating of the idea you have rated for.

Do I still see my own rank?

Yes. You will still be able to see your own rank and score. You don’t see the rank or score from any other idea in a hidden rank project.

So you might think, how do I get an idea of who my competitors are?

Well, we implemented a new filter for that. In hidden rank contests you will be able to filter for e.g the top 20 in random order. (Standard setting here is sort by random, filter by all)

How random is this “sort by random”?

Pretty random. The random sorting is updated once per hour.

Can I let people know the rank of my idea with a comment?

No you can’t, otherwise the whole hidden rank feature doesn’t make much sense. We won’t allow comments where you state your rank, such comments will be taken out.

We’re pretty excited about it, we would of course appreciate your feedback! If you have any questions just drop them here in the comments!

We’re keeping you posted with the new updates rolling out!

The next big thing that you’ll notice is that from today on, a contest will be referred to as a project.

We had the feeling that the term contest was too restricting and we wanted to use a term that we felt that was more fitting to our tasks.

Another new perk is a shiny new landing page.

So to wrap it up, I’ll say good luck to all of you on your current and next projects  !

Hey there jovotans,

As you may have noticed, jovoto made a few updates yesterday and more changes are on the horizon. We decided it was time for a revamp and aim to create a more simplified and enhanced experience for you! And that meant less clutter.

Using the less is more principle, one of the biggest changes that was made was loosing that old dashboard button.We felt it got a little redundant having both the logo and the page tab so gone it went. To get to your dashboard just click on that  lovable jovoto logo and it brings you right there.

Also you’ll notice a couple of other small changes, like the footer has a few less categories but don’t worry, you’ll still be able to find what you’re looking for.

Enjoy the layout and we’ll keep you updated on the next changes to come!

Lately we had some discussions about jovoto policies and about features that would improve the general experience of contests. We are very happy that some community members followed our invitation to discuss these issues at our Berlin office. It was a great conversation and we were quite impressed by the detailed and well documented ideas that some of our core users had put together for us.

Rating

We are aware that rating needs to be improved and that we need a way to allow rating various aspects of an idea. Unfortunately this is not trivial, since rating behavior influences other things, like Karma. We also must make sure that we can easily monitor rating behavior in order to identify manipulation attempts. Creating a system that allows all of this is one of the most important projects we work on at the moment. But we must get it right on the first attempt, because we cannot easily change over and over again. Please be patient with us.

On-briefness

This is one of the ongoing topics over the last 3 years. To give a clear statement here, jovoto will never take out ideas because they are off brief. The core believe of jovoto is that jovoto is platform for ideas. So also a place to think “out of the box”. We acknowledge that every now and then ideas that are off-brief win prize money and that this can be frustrating for everybody who worked hard within the boundaries of the briefing. We hope that the possibility to rate different aspects like “on-briefness” will help to solve this problem in the future.

A suggestions that came out of the talk yesterday was a short briefing on each idea overview page. This short brief should outline the requirements. We like the idea very much and will start working on it. Again, be patient. It may not seem like a big thing, but it will require some design to make it work with its full potential.

Copyright

To be clear: We don’t like to take down ideas. If it was up to us all ideas that are in line with our terms of use were welcome. We would also prefer to have the community decide through their rating. In case off (potential) copyright infringement, we don’t really have a choice, if we do not want to risk being taken to court. We simply can’t afford that.

Public vs Private contests

Public and Private contests have a different scope. Public contest reach a wider audience and have greater visibility & they often attract new users. Private contests on the other hand may often produce results that look more professional. We believe that both types of contests have their place on jovoto. Especially for public contests we have tools in place, that allow us to identify manipulation and our Karma threshold prevents one time users or fake users from manipulating the ranking. Of course we continuously work on improving our tools, though this might not always be visible in the front-end.

Ranking

Once an idea has acquired a good ranking position, it may gain momentum just because it gets more visibility. We have developed a feature that allows to hide ranking in a contest. We will start to experiment with that in some of the next contests and see how that will change the outcome. This is ready. You wont have to wait long to see it in action.

In case you have suggestions or questions feel free to drop them here in the comments or via PM.

P.S. I promised to mention I lost the ping-pong game against Voto. I lost with an embarrassing score of 5 – 11.

Why?

First of all, there are many interesting clients out there who would like to work with jovoto but need an extra level of confidentiality. Working with large brands on their latest innovation is a big thing, since they invest in e.g. research & development. Obviously they are cautious about sharing their ideas and strategies with everybody as these could leak through to competitors. As a result, so far mostly established design companies are trusted with these kind of projects. We believe it’s time to change that!

Secondly we take you guys and jovoto serious. We would like to offer contest models that require authentication so you will have the chance to work with bigger projects and clients. By offering a contest type that requires accepting an NDA we respond to a demand and expect to bring additional exciting projects to jovoto and new opportunities for you.

How does it work?

When trying to access a contest that’s marked “NDA”, you will see a text box containing a document entitled Non Disclosure Agreement. In order to proceed, you have to verify yourself with your infos and check the box “Yes, I have read and agree to the non disclosure agreement”. In doing so, you agree that you will not spread any information from this contest, including the briefing, other people’s ideas and even your own contributions, if they can be connected to the client or if they would unveil confidential information. This is a legal agreement between you and the client. (note: These contests will ONLY be visible for members who have access to private contests)

What does this mean for you?

For the whole process on the platform, not much. Nobody can see, vote, comment or submit anything in this contest without signing the NDA. What this does mean for you is that for a defined period of time after ending of the contest, you are not allowed

• to use the ideas you submitted in this contest for other purposes or (usually for 6 months after the contest )
• to disclose any information the client has provided to the contests (e.g. the briefing, background info etc. (usually for 36 months after the contest)
• to disclose information and ideas other creatives have contributed to the contest (usually 36 months after the contest)

We expect that those clients, who wish to run a NDA contest, will accept the indicated timelines, but in some cases the term of confidentiality can be longer. In any case, please check the Non Disclosure Agreement yourself, or check with somebody from community management. We worked hard with our lawyers until they came up with a legal text that is short, transparent and easy to understand.

Above all, if you have any questions, we -community management- are there to help you out.

When you submit a short description of a general idea with “more to come soon” or “will follow up later” essentially, you are putting a little “reserved” sign on your idea, which we call a place holder.

However, there are complex questions that come with place holders- for example what happens when the idea basics are “reserved” but never come back to and developed into a more elaborate picture?

“Reserved” signs

I used to work at a restaurant and nothing was more frustrating than when a table was saved for a reservation (little reserved sign and all) and the diners wouldn’t show up and wouldn’t even cancel the reservation! So we had saved the table all night, turning people away for no reason.

That’s kind of how we feel when we see a place holder that is never come back to or developed further. A potential creative and innovative experience isn’t fulfilled because the “owner” isn’t there to think it out.

–Okay, we know everyone is busy and has loads of other important things to do (on and off platform) so we understand, sometimes it happens that you can’t come back to your place holder idea–

So what to do?

We know every case is different- so there is no one way to handle all place holders. But when you know there’s an idea you’re not able to come back to- please leave a comment underneath and let others know you aren’t going to develop this idea and someone can either, collaborate with you or begin with this idea as their base.. It’s most considerate to let the idea continue on it’s way!