Description
[Ideas, Analysis, and Hypothesis]
This is both an intriguing and challenging topic. Several of our initiatives haven't been particularly successful. While many people like the idea of having a mascot character, they also understand the difficulties in implementing it.
Several factors contribute to our lack of success:
- Achieving consensus and making decisions is difficult because of the potentially wide-ranging impact. With unknown effectiveness, decisions often require "gut feelings," but we lack dedicated mascot or animation experts. This indicates we need a different decision-making approach.
- Creating, maintaining, and implementing characters requires significant effort and potential financial investment. Generative AI could substantially streamline this process.
- Issues regarding licensing and copyright remain unclear, and we lack a methodology for managing these aspects. This continues to be a challenging problem.
These factors constitute our main bottlenecks.
Nevertheless, we have one remarkable success story: "InnerSource Man" from the Japan community. While perhaps not perfect, this character is genuinely beloved within the Japanese community, and their sense of attachment cannot be discussed without mentioning "InnerSource Man."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NOh_-iFLYc (Japanese Original)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig5JqmVoKFY (English)
This initiative gained momentum because:
- It's not an official Foundation character but was created under KDDI's leadership (Japan's second-largest telecom company)
- It involved fewer stakeholders and shorter decision-making processes
- It was driven by community enthusiasm and passion
Well, even if it's a successful case, I still don't know how to make this official or how to add an official-ish flavor. The dependency on a large corporation further complicates matters in this case.
Considering these factors, we might enable bottom-up character creation with contributors relinquishing rights under a manageable CC-BY license. This would allow users to create unofficial characters that remain unofficial in operation. It's worth considering initiating documentation or supporting unofficial characters effectively, potentially creating an environment where they might be officially recognized in the future.