Design a logo, win fame and prizes

Cool! It’s a logo design contest for the OSS community. Get out those sketch tablets boys and girls, it time to contribute.

The Open Source Academy, a United Kingdom government project designed to encourage the use of open source software in the public sector, needs a logo. In the spirit of open source community, the Academy launched a logo design competition today, and you don’t have to be a professional graphics designer to enter.

The Open Source Academy is the brainchild of Mark Taylor, founder and executive director of the Open Source Consortium. He believes that the academy will help the U.K’s council governments catch up to other European countries in open source software adoption and use. The academy will provide advice on free and open source software use, training materials, product recommendations, and server space for collaborative open source software development so that the public sector can settle on open standards and move away from proprietary operating systems, applications, and file formats.

The logo competition is the first external manifestation of the U.K. government’s budding commitment to open source software and standards, says Taylor. “The idea for the competition was introduced by me, but it is, of course, an incredibly common idea in the open source world. There are any number of open source projects that do the same, and we thought it would be great for the logo to be designed in good old-fashioned open source project style. The interesting thing is that open source culture is alien to our friends at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), but they are taking to it remarkably well, and even seem to be enjoying themselves.” [Read the rest]