[okfn-discuss] Next steps on the Open Knowledge Tagline

Rufus Pollock rufus.pollock at okfn.org
Mon Jun 9 10:37:14 UTC 2014


Hi all,

We’ve now had a good amount of time for everyone to contribute ideas re the
tagline - I've personally contributed quite a few!

We’ve also had a chance to get some advice and input from Johnson Banks who
have been the professional advisors helping us with the logo, the narrative
etc.

First, off it is worth reiterating a few key points:


   -

   The tagline complements the narrative (the longer paragraph) and our
   name - it will usually be found with our name/logo and e.g. on the front
   page leads into the narrative
   -

   The tagline aims to be a succinct statement of our core purpose and
   reason for being, the driver of our work. It is not especially supposed to
   summarize who we are in terms of our structure (e.g. we don’t need it to
   say “we’re a community” or “we’re global” etc)
   -

   Common taglines for well known entities tend to be very short. E.g.
   Greenpeace - tagline is (I believe) “caring for the environment” or Nike’s
   “Just Do It”. Ours could be a bit longer since people are likely less
   familiar with who we are and the kind of area we work in but we still want
   it to be reasonably short
   -

   The tagline is aimed to be meaningful (if not a fully explanatory since
   it is so short) to people who aren’t already part of the core community
   -

   We almost certainly want the tagline to work in conjunction with the
   name, so assume it reads "Open Knowledge: [tagline] ". This means taglines
   which incorporate either open or knowledge run the risk of being repetitive
   e.g. imagine tagline was opening knowledge around the world. We’d then
   have: “Open Knowledge: opening knowledge around the world” which doesn’t
   read so well
   -

   It would be nice - but not essential - if the tagline allowed for
   customization for specific activities e.g. see how X can change the world
   can have X replaced by different things (such as “open science”)


Based on all of these considerations, reviewing the options on the wiki
<http://wiki.okfn.org/About_the_Open_Knowledge_brand/tagline_discussion>,
we have produced a suggested shortlist of:


   -

   Open Knowledge: see how information can change the world
   -

   Open Knowledge: see how data can change the world
   -

   [Open Knowledge:] Open knowledge, open data, open minds (we can possibly
   drop the Open Knowledge: prefix here since we have that as the first two
   words0
   -

   [No Tagline] - given the narrative and logo we could not have a
   designated tagline for the time being (and where we need something for e.g.
   t-shirts or stickers we could pull things from the narrative e.g. “creating
   power for the many, not the few”)

Does this seem a reasonable set of options? Are there other options people
would like to see considered?

If this is a good list, we can move to the next step which would be to
select the tagline from the shortlist.

Regards,

Rufus
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