Post event comedown + solo stay in hotel + beer(s) + Twitter = sharing half formed ideas and essentially committing myself to massive projects.

Again.

Anyway…

So this is the idea.

A Kickstarter coffee table style art book (of decent production quality) that celebrates the stickers, designers, teams and stories from public service internet in the last decade. I see this as digital gov – GDS and all the other Departments and teams but also Govcamp, civic tech, open data, things like Mozfest, Code for America brigades, 18F and pretty much anything else that falls into my broad definition of the ‘public service internet’. Oh and a certain wedding sticker.

The focus would be mission and vision* patches – but not ‘brands’.

I want to get an essay about NASA mission patches as the foreword – like this at the Washington Post maybe – even if that was apparently for kids!

The other element I want to do is that for one of the ‘rewards’ to be a blank sticker book – Panini style – with spaces for square, round, rectangle and hexagon stickers with space for notes about where/when/why…or something.

The response to the tweet/thread was even warmer than I expected so I guess I’m going to be spending my evenings in Oslo over the next month trying to work out how to do it.

To-do list

• Sign up some collaborators…I’m not doing this solo.
• Create a repository where people can upload any sticker artwork they have – including any attribution and license information they have…I guess this will be on Github but I wonder if there should be a less geeky route as well.
• Research how much this kind of thing actually costs to print/publish(!). I honestly have no idea – I mean I buy a lot of them but…Elliot did the 8Faces book a while ago so I guess I could ask him.
• Find out how to run a (successful) Kickstarter(!)

So anyway I guess I have another side hustle. Lets see how this shakes out.

Maybe I should start by creating a sticker 😀

 

*I think of ‘vision’ patches as those slogan style stickers that reinforce your vision, strategy or ways of working – rather than just promote a company/organisation/product.