The Workshop; thoughts about a special site for artwork submissions

In the 9.10 cylce, it became clear that this wiki is not suitable for collecting wallpaper submissions, due to technical reasons. Having to edit the wiki markup of an entire page is also quite a hurdle to take for contributors.

Using Flickr to collect photographic wallpapers was a success, but revealed a lack of features that would make the selection process much easier.

Should there be specific infrastructure for wallpaper submissions? What other material should be handled? Is there an opportunity to optimize the way the community and/or the designers at Canonical work?

The Wiki

Pro

• Already in place and used
• The content is entirely under our control

Contra

• Administrators and contributors have to deal with wiki markup for entire pages at once
• The surge protection feature sets a rather low limit to the number of images you can have on a single page. It also gets in the way if you want to view many images from 1 or more pages in a short duration. This alone is pretty much a K.o.
• No automatic thumbnail generation, no help to build galleries.

Flickr

Pro

• A large user base on Flickr. It's unlikely to see 1700+ submissions for one cycle on a custom site
• Thumbnail galleries
• Kept running by them

Contra

• Loading up large images only with a pro account
• No search for CC licensing terms within a group's pool, only either a plain search in a pool, or an advanced search that can't be limited to a pool.
• You can't tag images that are not your own (or where you have explicit permission from the author),
• No tools to vote or compare selections.

Shortcomings shared by this wiki and Flickr

• No way to set a hard requirement on image resolutions
• No rating system with averages
• No way to let users build sets to then compare these sets, looking at the intersection
• No tracking of theme development across cycles

Aspects/Features

• Account management
  • Groups/Permissions
  • Allow to hide content from users not belonging to a certain group
• Allow administrators to add briefings for each type of submission per cycle
• Requirements and options for submissions, regarding
  • files
    • minimum resolution or matching one specific resolution from a set (per submission type)
  • meta-data
    • authorship
    • licensing
    • categorisation
• Templates for the presentation of:
  • Wallpapers
  • (GTK) themes
  • Release posters
  • Countdown banners
  • One free-form for everything else (?)
• Manage source files such as SVG and XCF
• Automatic thumbnail generation and gallery views with filtering/search
• Discussion (comment system)
  • Nested
  • mark comments as refering to specific version of a submission
• Notifications (email) for additions, deletions, edits, comments.
• Link with Flickr, such that images from both places can be considered at once
• Versioning. Allow to add newer versions of a submission, while keeping the old ones available.
• Sets per user
  • Set comparison, including showing the intersection
• Desktop integration, background selection in Appearance dialog

Icon themes?

It might seem tempting to also handle icon themes, but here you have to deal with many separate items that still belong together. This would need quite a bit of specific infrastrcuture to be better than the current solution of the Breathe project.

Technical considerations

• Use of a version management system such as Bazaar? Launchpad?
• OpenID

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CategoryArtwork