As many of you know, Adobe gives us a gift certificate to the online Adobe store to give away every year. There are some conditions, basically restricting us to one non-upgrade item whose cost does not exceed $2100, but given that this is enough for anything but the Master Suite it's a pretty good deal. So in order to encourage our community to really get their thinking caps on, we're going to run a contest!

In order to do this, we are going to have a special December meeting on Tuesday, December 8th, which will coincide with National Computer Science Education Week.

The Contest!

The premise of the contest is pretty simple: Find some publicly available data set that is difficult for an everyday information seeker to access and comprehend, and present it so that anyone can easily understand it. Since this is a little vague... here are some examples (We may add more in the near future).

• 50 great examples of Infographics
• NY Times Election Day: What One Word
• The Periodic Table of Typefaces

If you're not certain what may be a good data set to use, here are some fun places to start:

• www.data.gov
• http://api.corpwatch.org/
• http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

Guidelines

The contest is not restricted by medium. The only restriction is that we must be able to display it online. Interpretive Dance, Paintings, Flash applications, Video Montages and Illustrations (hand or otherwise) are all valid entries.

Teams are perfectly acceptable, but there's only one prize per entry. You'll have to figure out how to divvy it up.

Submission Deadline is Tuesday, December 1st at one minute BEFORE midnight.

Submissions must be done via a Google form. PLEASE DO NOT ATTACH YOUR SUBMISSION. Send us a link to a location where we can download it, or if it is a static piece please tell us what you will need to set it up on the December 8th.

You will also be required to give a presentation on your submission at the meeting.  This presentation must be no more than 5 minutes long. 

If you cannot attend the presentation but still want to submit an entry, you must contact Steve Easley by Tuesday, December 1st and provide your submission as well as a printed overview for judges to read.

Although attendance is not mandatory to submit an entry, your chances of winning will be much greater if you are there to present and answer questions about your entry.

Prizes!

Right now there is only one prize. Since many of our members here are affiliated with Big Corporate Orgnizations That Have A Lot Of Money™, we would really appreciate it if you dropped a line to the powers that be to see if they'd be interested in sponsoring some additional ones. So far, the list is as follows:

• 1st Prize: Gift Certificate to the Adobe Online Store, usable for up to 1 non-upgrade software item or package whose cost may not exceed $2100
  Sponsored by Adobe
  
• Runner Up Prizes: 3 $25 Gift Certificates to Best Buy
  Sponsored by Fancy Brand Name, LLC

Restrictions

• You must be a member of Columbus Digital
• You must live in Central Ohio. Corporate addresses do not count.
• You must have attended at least one event or presentation night between August and November.
• The subject data must be public and presented in as impartial a way possible. Please do not stump.
• You may not use products that directly compete with the Adobe Creative Suite (Sorry, no Silverlight or iPhone applications).
• The item you create must be strictly for this contest. Client or otherwise branded work is not acceptable.
• No plagiarism.
• Work must be created between August 1st and December 1st, 2009.

Choosing a Winner

Adjudication of the winner will be done during the second half of our presentation night in December and will be done by popular ballot. This ballot will ask visitors to rate all entries on a scale of 1 to 10 on a series of dimensions that will not be disclosed until contest date.

Legalese

We reserve the right to change the terms of this contest if some lawyer comes along and tells us it's illegal in some way, shape, or form, or someone points out a glaring hole or omission in what we've posted here already. Thankfully, there's no purchase involved in the slightest, so we can dodge most of the legal iffy bits.

Questions?

Post them here, I'll answer them as quickly as I can.