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The Mozilla Creative Collective is our ongoing initiative to organize and build Mozilla’s visual design community. When the site goes live later this year it will be an active community hub with a network of artists that have come together for a common purpose – to share their talents with the world while helping to promote the Mozilla Project.

John has been covering the design process of the logo, and more recently the first round of website designs (which look amazing by the way).  But I’d like to delve a little deeper and reveal some of the specific features we’ve been cooking up for the site.

Of course, building a successful online community from scratch takes a lot of work and planning.  To attract members and encourage active participation, you need to offer incentives for people to join and unique benefits that they can derive through their membership over time.  In other words, it’s important to offer heaps of social capital. Social capital reflects the value of social networks through things like: new connections; exposure to highly influential people; access to resources, ideas and talent; opportunities to grow your reputation; public displays of your accomplishments; etc.

Taking all of this into consideration, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking of ways members of the Creative Collective can accrue social capital (while also making their experience as fun as possible).  For example, artists will be able to establish their presence through a detailed profile page which will host information about them along with a gallery of their work.  They’ll “follow” and connect with their favorite artists, or download source files of their favorite submissions.  They’ll also be able to take advantage of other social features such as “likes”, commenting, sharing and more.

Another way we’re going to encourage participation is through the concept of badges.  Badges are digital icons that will be awarded to members for different levels of contributions, and will be publicly displayed on their profiles for all to see.  There are many ways you’ll be able to contribute to the Creative Collective….by submitting original designs or remixes, participating in design challenges, providing commentary on other people’s work, and so on.  Each of these are positive actions that deserve recognition, and will be rewarded with a digital badge of honor.  Here is what we have so far (big thanks to the team at Airbag for coming up with these awesome names):

• Hero of the Collective - Winner of 10 design challenges
• Champion of the Collective - Design challenge winner
• Fellow of the Arts – Participated in 25 design challenges
• Minister of Design – Placed in the top 5 of a design challenge
• Pixel Charmer – Work has received 25 likes
• Mix Master D – Remixed 25 designs
• The Producer – Has had a design remixed 10 times
• The Critic – Writes a comment on 25 designs
• Founder – A limited edition badge for those who create an account within the first week of launch

And that’s just a sneak peek.  Stay tuned for more updates on the Mozilla Creative Collective…ways you can participate and build up your social capital.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under MCC, Marketing, Mozilla Creative Collective, Planet Mozilla, social capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.