Promoting The Repository

For this project to grow, more collaborators and requests are needed. How will we go about this in the long run? There are some simple and some more ellaborate ways of doing so.

Being The Best

The simplest idea is also the least quantifiable and therefore very difficult. By being the best and biggest repository around people will turn to us as we gather more moentum/gravity. To not quote Field of Dreams:

Build it and they will come.

Also there are several decal collections around, like the minifigcustomizationnetwork.com. This have been around for some time and their collections are vast. But we are the first library for svg decals. And svg gives us some nice advantages. Also we're the first using a cvs. Another advantage. See Highlight Strengths below.

Signatures

Promote the repository in your forum signatures, your email signatures or wherever you want.

Brand Building

This would work best if we had a logo, around which we build our "brand". From there it should be easy to build banners and tags for signatures, sites, profiles, etc.

A website would help to have an official place to look at our decals.

Communities

This project originated at eurobricks.com. As such it will always be our home, but their are more communities out there were we can promote our project. Also this will increase our reach for requests.

• Eurobricks of course
• flickr.com join the Lego and Decal groups and post your work their. Just don't forget to add a link to the project.
• Mocpages of course is great for showing off Lego related work.
• fbtb is another well known Lego community.

Behaviour

We want to leave a positive image. So be polite and follow the house rules of the community. Also don't necessarily limit yourself to one thread. We don't mean to spam them (remember be polite), on the contrary actually.

Look at Eurobricks. We answer the requests in the decal request thread and have one thread for the repository. Open thread for your individual works, like the others their. Use the decals in your Mocs. Make people pay attention to you and then tell them all about the project.

Activities

Join in community activities to make yourself known. Also we might want to start activities to gather followers. Decal creators are as much needed as requests.

Social Media

No Facebook. Ever!

We could add a twitter channel, to inform followers of new decals, or activities. Similar to a rss feed of commits.

Highlight Strengths

Using svg as our image format gives us several strengths.

• It can be easily edited, e.g. a change of color is a simple process.
• No loss of quality through compression.
• The print-quality can be easily adapted to newer standard resolution. Other collections often have old images with low resolution. These can be hardly used anymore.
• Reusability. You can pick anything from the library, or even from the finished decals to mix and match new decals.

The following lists strengths gained through a cvs.

• It will never be gone. Even if the repository owner decides to take it down, or become a raving lunatic. The repository won't be lost. Anyone with a clone of the repository can set up a new home within minutes.
• Gradual improvements of decals. Since we are working in a cvs anyone can take a decal and improve it, like correcting colors. The complete history of each document is recorded, so changes can be traced back. More importantly though the log will contain the reason why it was changed.

Make the Repository as Accessible as Possible

Looking and downloading decals should be as easy as possible. We're heading that way with the homepage.

Joining Github to be able to commit might seem a burden. Especially with technically non-saavy people. I don't see a reasonable way around this.

Possible Roadblocks

People might be interested, how they can promote themselves as individuals. Individuals create these decals, after all. Our answer thus far, was that everyone's free to post their work in any community they want (see communities above). But since we're also offering rendered versions of the decals some might think it superfluous to go somewhere else to store png versions of their work.

It may be tehnically possible to add the creators name to every decal (github log, or metadata portion of the svg), but we have to ask ourselves if we want this. How would we handle revisions, etc.?