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!

It’s really pretty cool because now you can easily

• show the community and the clients  your skills

• and the industries you have work experience in.

Just go to your “Profile”, “Edit my Profile” and “Skills” respectively “Industries”, hover over the little boxes and click on the ones you’d like to mark. The green checkbox will show you that you’ve successfully chose that skill or industry – no need to save. This way you can easily show your skills to the community and clients and this will gain you a lot of benefits. We’re working on a couple of extremly nice features that will be rolled out based on the extended user profile in the next couple of months:

• new filter options that allow you to search for your perfect collaboration partner
• new filter options that’ll make it easier for you to find the right tasks on jovoto
• the opportunity to make parts of your profile public so that you can actually use it as a portfolio
• a search function so that people who are looking for freelance talent can find you
• and invitations to smaller projects with guaranteed payment based on your profile information – we’re working on setting this up as an opportunity for our most talented creatives

So get down and fill out your profile information today!

First of all, let’s define what we’re considering to be “sidemails”. A “sidemail” is a private message send to fellow community members

• to notify them about one’s own idea
• to ask them to review the idea
• to ask them to rate the idea
• and lastly the most shady business of offering so called “vote tradings”.

From jovoto community management perspective we have a pretty clear opinion on those phenomena.

Obviously, we strictly dismiss “vote trading”. In the FAQ “What is bad rating behaviour”? we’ve found nice words to explain what we think about it: “If your rate mine with 10 I rate yours with 10″ – omg, might even be lamer than supporting a friend. Don’t spam others with pm’s and beg for ratings.

It’s a definite No Go and if we find out about it we put the involved creatives’ rating status on false, so their ratings don’t count anymore.

But we’re also no fans of the other softer versions of sidemailing. Our understanding of the best (and only) way to make other community members aware of one’s own idea is being active in a contest by giving constructive feedback and rating the other ideas in a fair and objective way. In this sense, sending sidemails is like fishing for compliments without wanting your own hands to get wet. You could also say it’s a bit fishy. Or you could say it’s like throwing fish at vegans (you know, they don’t want fish…). Ähm yes, anyway, enough bad analogies, I am confident you got the point.

by Catounette

Hence, in pursuit of the fair and fun work space we want jovoto to be, let’s all agree on NOT sending sidemails as described above. Let’s work together and collaborate in more productive ways. Remember that we all make this place happen with our joined efforts. Let’s remind newbies in a friendly tone of voice about this “convention”.

Agreed?

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

Looking back on my first week on our jovoto team tumblr I see I had a slightly unconscious connection to rainbows.. Perhaps it’s holding on to the last bit of summer or well, I just like to look at the pretty colors..

First it was this cheeky piece from New York based artist, Peter Coffin that caught my eye.

Endless summer spiral rainbows 4evr !

And doesn’t that look nice. -And inspire you to go clean and organize your room?

More very cool explorations in organization at thingsorganizedneatly.

How cool is this? It’s a jelly fish that was found off the coast of Tasmania in 2009. What you see making this lovely rainbow is actually the light reflecting off the tiny hairs it uses to propel itself through the water. Sea life never ceases to amaze me?

So after that, I’m off the rainbow kick (for now) but I’ll share 2 other things I am inspired by.

First is the work-in-progress from artist, James Turell at the Roden Crater in the state of Arizona.

He literally purchased this crater in 1979 and is working on turning it into a “naked-eye observatory”. Because his work predominately explores light, space and atmosphere, this is his giant playground.

I guess not only was I inspired by rainbows but examining natural phenomena. So last but certainly not least, I’ll leave you with this breathtakingly beautiful video coming to us from California. Enjoy !

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Big news here! After 4 months and over 15.000 (!!!) logo submissions, the Jury of the Human Rights Logo initiative has made their final selection for the Top 10 logos. Last Saturday the platform opened displaying these 10 logos for the last and final voting phase.

Sign onto humanrightslogo.net to vote for your favorite logos, yes I said logoS (more than 1!) that you feel best represents Human Rights. This is very exciting stuff here! It means we are getting closer to finding THE Human Rights Logo– and you can help decide.

The final voting phase runs until September 17th, 2011.. That means get on there before the 17th so you too can participate in finding the worlds first Human Rights Logo!

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.

The Free Culture Incubator is a series of workshops initiated by Ela Kagel, with the aim to explore the different facets and models that make up ‘free’ culture, ranging from digital rights to open innovation and collaborative consumption.

This session’s topic is:

COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY
Open Innovation and other Methods to Activate People & Resources

Together with Ela, Dominik & Simon Wind, Jonathan Imme (Until We See New Land), and Ariane Jedlitschka (HAL – Hybrid Art Lab), we will be introducing different models of open innovation and facilitating break-out sessions in which we share experience and develop ideas and guidelines for successful open innovation.

Location: Supermarkt | Brunnenstraße 64, 13355 Berlin |1-6 pm

Participation slots are limited, so please Sign up here!

Graphic recordings by Anna Lena Schiller, created at transmediale '10