Panel of Community Members to Choose Best 20th Anniversary T-shirt Design

A number of you have reported issues with the T-shirt Design Contest poll. We have reviewed these reports in depth and want to thank you, the community, for bringing them to our attention.

Indeed, the T-shirt voting poll has been demonstrating some irregularities. To be specific: we’ve received multiple votes from the same IP addresses during the same 24-hour period. As we stated when we launched the poll, voters should only be able to vote once per day. This has inflated the results for some of the designs, and we can no longer trust the ultimate poll results.

Because the winning design will be the basis for this year’s LinuxCon attendee T-shirt and honored as the 20th Anniversary of Linux design, we are restricted by a timeline to get the design to print in time for the special event. As a result, we have appointed a panel of people representing Linux.com, LinuxCon and the overall Linux community to choose the winner from among our six finalists this year. This is a respected and trusted group of community members who we believe together will honor the designers and this year’s important milestones with a smart, thoughtful choice. This format is similar to the judging we conduct for the annual Linux Foundation Video Contest.

Because of this change and to express our sincere thanks to each designer for participating in the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt Design contest, we want to do something to recognize each of our finalists. So this year, we will have the five runner-ups each printed on one, limited edition T-shirt, framed and put on display in a special gallery at LinuxCon. Afterwards, we will mail the framed T-shirts to their respective designers. As reported, the winning design will be the basis for the LinuxCon attendee T-shirt and will be available to purchase in the Linux.com Store. Though, the winner will also receive one of their T-shirts, framed, as well.

Our T-shirt Design Contest Judging Panel is:

Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, managing editor, Linux.com
Angela Brown, Events Director, The Linux Foundation
Matthew Fillpot, 2011 Linux.com Guru and Linux.com Moderator
Jon “maddog” Hall, FOSS veteran and advocate, LinuxCon keynoter

The panel will review the designs through June 22, 2011, and the winner will be notified and announced shortly thereafter.

We are sorry for this divergence from our original voting system for this year’s contest and thank the community again for bringing the issues to our attention. Our aim is to be transparent and fair, and we look forward to honoring all of this year’s finalists in the weeks and months ahead.