Project Principles
From Open Clip Art Library Wiki
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Project Principles
- For the moment, SVG should be the only format accepted as the base format to keep things simple.
- There is no fundamental objection to the project providing bitmap versions of SVG images, if there are requests and help to do this.
- There is no fundamental objection to the project providing non-svg vector format versions of SVG images, if there are requests and help to do this.
- In order to allow the widest usage of the images, the only acceptable "license" is release to the public domain.
- To simplify submissions for this project, submissions must be Creative Commons "Public Domain Dedicated"
- The project will use XMP to mark all downloadable SVG files with appropriate licensing information (See http://creativecommons.org/technology/xmp creativecommons.org).
- All files will be named according to an as yet to be decided method.
- The naming method decided upon should take into account that file contents should be easily recognizable from the name.
- The project aims to have rich metadata for all of its files.
Philosophies
What is the bigger picture of this project?
The Open Source community's growth in recent years has generated vast amounts of public good. Benefits beyond software have taken root. Other kinds of electronic public resources are evolving, such as Wikipedia, Groklaw, and more. The Open Clip Art Library participates in this expansion of Open Source philosophies in art.
In particular, we focus on clip art because it is analogous to source code, in that it is intended for reuse, modification, and incorporation into larger works. Unlike "regular" art, that exists solely for its own sake, clip art's purpose in life is to be reused as widely as possible. "Regular" art succeeds by the level of its "appreciation", whereas clip art succeeds from its level of "utility". Modification and redistribution of "regular" art might be considered plagerism, however with clip art there is no such stigma; on the contrary, having one's clip art be adapted and reused for many different purposes is a sign of success.
One interesting aspect of clip art is that it represents a value flow from artist to non-artist, in much the same way that Open Source software often represents a value flow from programmer to non-programmer. In other words, it presents a way for a new class of skilled person to accumulate value for society through volunteer computer activity. In this case, the valued skill is drawing rather than programming. :-)
"Clip art" has traditionally gotten a (deservedly) bad reputation in that oftentimes the art available commercially (such as through bargain-bin CD's or packaged with a software application) are often not that good. This may be because the artists lacked the time and manpower to make good art, or because it was made without a clear understanding of what the user would need.
The Open Clip Art Library has a significant advantage over these products in that our model ties users and artists together to work together in evolving the collection. Any user who can create clip art can become a contributor by simply uploading their work, thus enabling OCAL to scale up far beyond what any commercial clip art producer could ever afford. As well, since most clip art is created for a specific purpose (such as to solve the artist's own need), it means that the art was intended for a particular use to begin with. Further, by providing the art as public domain, we enable people to easily make derivatives or to submit alternate versions, thus ensuring that a low quality or low utility submission can be replaced by a higher quality or higher utility version. A scoring system can be used to allow users to give higher ranks to better examples, and to filter out poorer ones. This means that over time, the level of quality of the library will naturally increase; there is a natural built-in inclination to make artists strive to ensure their works are going to be at least as good as what others have submitted. Gradually, the library will become very high quality via this "collaborative optimization" process.
What is this project's purpose and mission?
This project exists primarily to help establish a huge resource of vector art for the community. As part of this, we wish to promote the general support of the SVG standard in a wide range of art tools, and provide our clipart collection as a carrot to help motivate the projects to include this support. As well, we wish to promote placement of art in the Public Domain, to enable easy, unfettered use of drawing components such as clipart, fonts, patterns, and so forth. We also believe that authors work should be acknowledged, both as a way to enable users to find similar works and to give credit where credit is due.
