Minutiae

This is just a collection on background information about the project. It may just be a boring way for you to see my thinking process. But in the spirit of open, here we go...

Thanks to Ed Blayney and the Innovation Office for the feedback.

Name Background

Started as Gov In The Open, then this was part of the refinement process for the name. I wanted it to be something broad but descriptive, not taken, and with a fine acronym.

Other Potential Names

1. City Actions

2. City Collaborative (taken)

3. City Alliance (Alliance overused [by me], eg Civic Data Alliance?)

4. Gov Alliance (conference, Smart eCity Gov Alliance?) - City Gov Alliance

5. Open City Coalition

6. Coalition of Open Governments (COG, Coalition for short) (too much like “coalition government?”)

7. Open Cityship (ship in the logo: travel, journey, destination, crew, many jobs, all hands on deck)

8. Civic Open Coalition (COC though...)

9. Government Open Coalition (GOC, Gov Open Coalition, GovOpCo, The Open Coalition)

10. Open Government Coalition (OGC, The Coalition) - New winner!

11. Open Government Partnership (ship analogy/logo since it has ship in it) Previous winner... it's kinda taken

12. Municipal Open Partnership (MOP, ship, MuniOpPa)

13. Municipal Open Coalition (The MOC)

14. Civic Code Coalition (Building the Smart City one line (script) at a time)

15. Municipal Open Code Coalition…

Keyword Pool

• Government, City, Municipal, Civil, Civic

• Open, Share

• Collaborative, Partnership, Alliance, Coalition, Cooperation, Friendship, Kinship, Fellowship, League, Support

• Results, Outcomes, Actions, Projects, Impactful

• Smart City, Open Source, deployable-code

Logo

What, it's a sailboat in a sunset, how does that relate to city collaboration?? There is a city in the background... I wanted the logo to be friendly and accessible, not governmental. The name can communicate the purpose, but the logo should communicate the feeling. Something outdoors, that implied collaboration, a journey, and no government buildings! The boat implies we are working as a crew to get somewhere, each doing the parts that we can do.

No: Cloud, Gov Building, CodeData

Yes: Animals? (squirrel?), Nature, Outside, People, Mountain, Journey, Ship

Ideas: For ship: all hands on Deck, Mast, flag, masthead, sailing seas, forecastle, crew. Friendship!

Logo and Text Result

Here is what I came up working on it one night. It could be improved... I wanted a different kind of ship (eg older with about 4 sails), and had an idea to split the image in the logo into 3 parts/slices (blueprint/sketch, black and white ink, and final color, eg, like we are building something) but that proved to be too much.

Here are the source logo files for anyone who has time to edit.

Originally I had a version where the sails were on backwards - the jib was over the stern and the boom over the bow for some reason (Ed Blayney pointed that out) - I fixed that in the current version, which has a larger boat too.

The OGC letters are custom made, inspired by Century Gothic (which you see on the Open Government Coalition logo text on the home page). Had a version where the O G and C overlapped each other with breaks and over/underpasses, but didn't have time to refine that idea enough.

Some parts of the vector artwork came from Freepik.