Artwork/Communication

Fedora Art Communication / Marketing

We kicked off this project with the following fedora-art-list discussion:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-February/msg00222.html

The Problem

The wiki isn't a great place nor an easy place to post and share artwork. It's hard to critique, comment on, and propose revisions for individual pieces. There is also no standard way to get the source artwork for things, and sometimes it can be unclear who created which artwork. It is also hard to browse artwork on the wiki and search for artwork.

Requirements

(in rough priority order)

• RSS feeds, preferably with embedded thumbnails. Essential is a group-wide feed, awesome would be additional per-tag and per-artist feeds.
• Must be able to provide SVG and any other source art, as well as bitmap art in a variety of sizes per art piece.
• People should be able to easily get an account and upload their own images. Whatever they upload must be under whichever license we choose (CC-BY-SA?)
• Must have a commenting system on a per-image basis.
• We should have a space where we can post current art requests / contests / events etc on the front page.
• Rating system important.
• Tagging system for images would be awesome.
• Version control (so you can upload 'fixes' or 'revisions' to artwork) would be nice.
• Friends lists / Group ability (so print artists could have their own group, themers another) might be nice.
• Would be nice to have 'image of the week' or other such call-out functionality.
• Integration with fedora account system would be nice :)
• maybe we want to host binary files with a PNG preview for things like GRUB splash, GDM themes, RHGB themes

The Ideas

Hosted / Third-Party Stuffs

Set up a Deviant art community

We have a community set up now (MairinDuffy set it up), take a look: http://fedora-art.deviantart.com/

The advantages of deviant-art:

• is that it is completely tailored for illustrations/designs, not just photos. - it's free, and you can easily attach your source SVGs (or any other type of source files) for your work directly to each piece.
• pretty much everything is available as an RSS feed
• nice commenting system for individual pieces
• no upload/usage limits
• licensing on images is explicit - when you create a piece of artwork you determine the license explicitly

Disadvantages:

• the RSS feeds don't actually embed the image, they only provide a link. (does anyone know if it embeds the image for paid subscription accounts? I'd be willing to donate the $$ if so.) - having a group appears to be kind of a hack. you actually create a user that serves as the group, add your group members as friends (who also add the group as followers), and one or a small group of people have to manually upload things to the gallery. (this can be a good thing though, we can use the favorites system to highlight any fedora work, including drafts, and only add final/polished work to the gallery.)

Flickr community

We have one of these too now (MairinDuffy set it up): http://www.flickr.com/groups/fedora-art/

Advantages:

• free to get an account
• it doesn't require manual intervention to get graphics in the gallery. any group members can push their images to the group pool. (and if inappropriate/whatever stuff gets pushed the admin can remove it)
• you can create invite-only groups or make them completely open.
• licensing on images is explicit - when you create a piece of artwork you determine the license explicitly - the RSS feeds do actually embed the image, and include any descriptive text you added to the image so even though you can't upload your source here, you can add a link to it in the description and it'll be published to the feed.
• tagging system makes it easier to browse all the pictures
• the UI is pretty nice :)
• the RSS feeds are also awesome in that I think they can be per tag as well as for the entire pool of images
• having a group isn't a hack, it's definitely built for that

Disadvantages:

• theres a limit per month on how much you can upload per user account (I think it's 50mb/month.) - flickr is focused entirely towards photos. while i read their terms of service and made sure that it was okay for us to use for our purposes - people won't be able to search for our artwork using the UI because it seems they block non-photos from that according to their policy.

Shadowness

I looked briefly at shadowness.com, which is pretty similar to deviantart but they have explicit groups *and* their RSS feeds embed images. However, their copyright policies are pretty weird. I've also never heard of it before (have any of you?) Not sure how reliable/trustworthy it is? Flickr and deviantart have both been around a while.

picassaweb.google.com

It can be used by artists, give RSS feeds with thumbnails but does not have groups. It can be used if we go with only a planet aggregation.

• Major disadvantage: it support only jpg, not even png

Roll Our Own

Have an art-specific Planet Fedora feed

It would be something like http://art.planet.fedoraproject.org and it would be an aggregator for artwork, not general blog posts. (E.g. you could syndicate your deviant art portfolio feed or a flickr fedora art album feed to this.)

Whichever other option we go with, it should produce suitable RSS feeds so we should probably do this anyway. We need to gather everyone's feed URLs to move forward with this.

Set up a version control repository

Advantages:

• we can track versions of artwork and its sources
• would ultimately be controlled by the fedora project, not a third-party so more reliable

Disadvantages:

• likely will be difficult for folks to browse on, not possible to comment on really

- high technical barrier to entry

Fedora hosted project

The Infrastructure project plan to offer hosting space, developers.fedoraproject.org and people.fedoraproject.org: use this space and host our own solution.

Example: https://fedorahosted.org/bluecurve

cchost

ccHost is what we are using at http://openclipart.org - the software have a lot of features: users, feeds for everything, comments, ratings. Is not very mature in my experience but is sponsored by Creative Commons. Can be configured to use a lot of file types, including SVG.

• a drawback of ccHost is the way it incluse thumbnails: inside a "media:thumbnail" and an "enclosure" tag, both ways not supported by PlanetPlanet software, so to use them we may need to request the feature or patch ourself.

Gallery

again, in our own hosting space run an instance of Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/) - I don't have any experience with installation or administration, but from the website it seems it recently it gained support for RSS feeds.

Coppermine

Coppermine (http://coppermine-gallery.net/) is another php widely used photo album with support for users, albums, ratings, comments and more. With an external plugin (http://cpmfetch.fistfullofcode.com/) it can generate RSS feeds (I don't have first hand experiece with this either).

Hosting Issues

PHP vs Python vs ?

A thread was brought up on the fedora-infrastructure-list about whether or not it would be possible to host a PHP solution for our needs (Eg ccHost):

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-March/msg00024.html

From the discussion it seems:

• We need to come up with a list of formal requirements.
• We need to file a format RFR (Request for Resources) with the Infrastructure Team . Instructions on how this works are here: [Infrastructure/RFR]