When I was reading the literature about crowd sourcing and prosuming I thought that these were very innovative ways of involving the audience into the process of serving a product or service . As a board member of a faculty association I have the opportunity to organize events and turn ideas into practice. For our short trip we want to make sweaters for the persons that participate. Unfortunately, we do not have a design, yet. My idea was, in imitation of the concept of Threadless, to make a contest out of it. Members can create their own design and upload it on to our Facebook page. The design with the most votes will be printed on the sweaters and the designer will get name recognition. The goal of the contest is of course engaging our members to be part of the faculty association and that their opinion is valuable to us, because without them we would not even exist.
So taking this idea into practice it takes some preparation. How big can the design be, where will it exactly be placed? Do we give the members some guide lines or do we want to give them artistic freedom? Will the entire idea strike the audience or not at all?
This is something I have to work on with the other board members before we can take the contest online. Luckily I have the appropriate literature and a lot of websites to take advantage of.
