I'm not going to say a whole lot about this because for the most part I'm preaching to the choir here.  But, if you live in the United States, before you do anything else today, you need to contact your representatives in congress about SOPA and PIPA.

If you're not familiar with these bills, reddit has a good overview.

Okay, I finally found the time to analyze the results of my little survey.

There were 47 participants who completed the survey and 18 participants who didn't complete it. Thanks to all of you!
To make sure everyone is counted only once, I decided to create the statistics only from the completed surveys.

A large majority seems to think pretty positiv about art challenges in general, and more than half of the participants have already entered one of our contests. Many of those who haven't entered yet either wrote that they aren't artists or that they didn't have enough time to do so.

Most people liked the idea of rather general topic challenges. And a majority liked the idea of a guest FOSS project aswell.
On the other hand, art challenges which focus on a specific type of art, free-for-all challenges and challenges based on annual events were rated rather negative.

The question whether the contests should be hold on a regular period of time base or whenever someone comes up with an idea was answered pretty clearly:
51 percents voted for a regular period of time. But since 36 percents voted for both, there might sometimes be contests which are not based on the regular period aswell.

The average answer on how long such a period should be was 2.31 weeks, and the average length of a single contest was 10.66 days.

You can get a more detailed report about the results here.

So what will future art challenges on OGA be like?

I'll try to keep the contests rather general, but if there is a FOSS project which needs art, just drop me a mail.

I'll announce the contests more clearly, and not only on the website but also on IRC.

Since many people told me that they didn't have enough time to submit art for the challenges, future contests will be based on a 3 week cycle: two weeks for the challenge and one week for voting. This won't hurt the ones who like the contests quick and dirty, but will give the more sophisticated ones at least a bit more time.

In their comments, many people suggested that there should be a better way to motivate artists to join the contests. Maybe a first improvement would be to show the medals in forum posts again and to give all the contest winners who haven't received one yet the 'contest winner' medal. Someone also mentioned having a monthly newsletter and announcing the winners there might help. We'll see what we can do.