>> Alexis PM via tde-devels wrote:
>>> My suggestions:
>>>
>>> 1) December as a working period for submitting new proposals, resolve
>>> this in January. December is a month with numerous holidays in many
>>> countries, artists who may be too busy the rest of the year may have
>>> more free time this month.
>>
>> good point, I also agree with this
>>
>
> Yes I agree. December is a good time to get calm and dreaming. This could
> be a good time for other ideas and creativity. It would be great if new
> graphics could be prepared during January to March so that we can
> integrate it into upcoming R14.1.0.
>
>>> 2) Announce on the front page of the TDE website that there is an open
>>> call for designs for new project mascot. Enable web form or email to
>>> which to send proposals.
>>>
>
> Yes, a short website announcement could be good.
> Or at least email to announcements ML.
>
> I don't know if it makes sense to create a separate mail address or a
> special web page. The possibilities were considered either sending a
> mailing to devels ML or creating a page on tde TDE Wiki.

In my humble opinion, a web form on the TDE website is the best option. It is an ideal way to organize the submission of proposals, it allows to establish mandatory fields such as real name and email (without being publicly visible) and to accept some minimum legal conditions (basically: that the person declares that it is his original work and has not been transferred to anyone, that this work has not been or is not used as a recognizable image by another initiative, project or organization, and that the person freely and completely gives it to TDE for free and without any condition beyond the cite of the original creator -the name or pseudonym of the author's choice- on the TDE website). (The real name is for legal reasons associated with the minimum legal conditions).

An additional requirement is the format: Source or editable format (Blender .blend, Inkscape .svg, GIMP .xcf,...) must be provided, not only the export to image, because the mascot must be integrated with the logo and other artwork of the project, now and in the future.

>>> 3) Announce the call for designs for new project mascot on websites
>>> and user mailing lists of artistic free software projects, for example
>>> websites and user mailing lists of Blender, Krita, GIMP,...

I add (I forgot) Inkscape to the enumeration.

> I have doubt about whether it could be beneficial to send challenges to
> other communities than that are interested in the development of TDE.

Double benefits:

* It opens the doors of participation to a much larger community. There are many people who have fun drawing with Blender/Inkscape/Krita/GIMP just for leisure and even if they are not TDE users they will be very happy that their leisure creation is useful for a free software project.

* The advertisement itself serves as publicity for the project: it makes the project known to free software users who are not aware of its existence (or who assume that this KDE-3 fork must have died because years later it is not in the Debian repo). There will be people that even if they do not participate with pet drawings, they will be curious about this unknown desktop environment and it is possible that a percentage of people will even be encouraged to use it and/or make some mention or article in their circles.

Although there are people who are very committed to TDE and who do it very well, the small number of people actively involved in its development is a danger to the medium-term survival of TDE. Increasing the number of people is good for TDE. I don't want you to stop being who you are, but more human power in TDE is good. For example, I have reported again in the "new" bug tracker (gitea) the historical quanta bug VPL with the accents in VPL, quanta is the best free HTML editor that exists and it is a pain when I teach HTML learning courses to warn the students to avoid the accents error in VPL, I have clear that fixing this bug pending for many years is due to the lack of people and time to do it but Slavek and company can only thank you for the voluntary work you do to keep this alive.

4)
>> The user and dev community can vote for the mascot somehow
>> It would be fully democratic and legit for me even if it is Tristan the
>> Bear

I agree.

>> My requirement is that it somehow attaches to the old KDE and to Trinity
>> ... so it could be a three headed dragon or similar
>>
>> Tristan and the bear are far away from the connotations I have with the
>> words Trinity and the KDE3 now TDE.
>
> The requirement that the new mascot should be connected with the original
> KDE mascot does not seem good to me. On the contrary, it seems better if
> the new mascot will be obviously different, not another dragon variant.
> Although I like the dragons, I also like bears. I like proposal from
> Phillipe. And Tristian / Tee seems to me a very beautiful name.

I suggest not to put additional conditions to the mascot design. Personally if someone submits a nice dragon, it probably will win my heart. But I think every artist should be free to design the mascot they want and the TDE community should be free to choose a mascot other than a dragon. Maybe the new mascot will be a bear, an arctic fox, a parrot or a frog (there are blue parrots and frogs if you care about color) and we will be very happy.

If it's the name, there are already legendary dragons like the (Babylonian) Tiamat and the (Chinese) Tianlong, which we can affectionately call Ti ;)

Best regards,