The Rise of Purdue Pete
Purdue Pete is the icon of (you guessed it) Purdue University. Yesterday it launched upward from the hundreds to the thousands and will no doubt reach 10k sometime today, if not before this even gets published.
This was done though a well organized effort on the behalf of Purdue fans (faculty, staff, students, alumni, etc.). They got the word out and organized a "voting day" with a set goal of 10,000 votes in 36 hours.
This was assisted by having a table set up with three iPads set to Cuusoo. Students could come up, register, and support with great ease.
All in all it looks like a well orchestrated event. I speculated that some group would eventually do this kind of networked voting process to promote a project. I had however assumed that it would be a company at a convention though rather than a University.
There was one identified case of ballot stuffing. This was less than 100 supports and negligible to valid support levels at the time and of course, relative to the support pouring in. None the less, Cuusoo takes fake votes very seriously and has addressed the issue.
Some Cuusoo users are a bit offended by what Purdue has done but it is well within the rules. Cuusoo has a very clear policy on this. As long as it is one person per vote, that is all that matters.
There were others who were very upset that the project's unique tags isolated it from other projects on Cuusoo. Tags are the metadata that Cuusoo uses to suggest related projects that Cuusoo users might also like. With the tags being unique like "boiler up" they had no connections with other project and therefore people coming to Cuusoo to vote for Pete, were not shown other projects that they might like to support.
I asked the project creator, Dr. San Miguel, about their unique tags. They confirmed that this was not intentional and upon being informed expanded their tags to be more inclusive of the larger Cuusoo community.
Of course there are also the detractors who still think that this is some kind of "invasion" of Cuusoo by people who "don't care about Lego." To them I have this to say:
Cuusoo is not an election or a competition. Excluding very similar projects (i.e. the two Portals projects), the success of any one project does not impinge on the success of another. If one more person know about Cuusoo because of the Purdue Pete project, it is a net gain for Cuusoo. If one person supporting Purdue Pete supports one other project, that is a support that would not have occurred otherwise. This is a win for Cuusoo as a whole, not just for Purdue Pete.
Pete and the Review Phase
Only a few projects have made it to this phase so any guesses as to the eventual outcome is a bit of a gambit. Each new project reaching 10k does seems to bring a new perspective on what projects are viable for Cuusoo to produce.
This project is very unique relative to all the other projects in that it has a very specific, identifiable, localized audience. There is no question of inappropriateness of subject matter, and there should be no difficulty for Lego designers to recreate a viable Pete using Lego standards. Purdue does not seem to be against the idea of working with Lego so their is likely to not be a dispute over licensing. Most of the hurdles that many Cuusoo projects face have already then been addressed. This leaves of course Brand Fit and Business case. This is wholly up to Lego to decide with very little to go on for speculation. TLG is going to have to decide on whether or not there is a legitimate market for the set and if they want to go down the path of producing corporate/institutional icons. I for one am eager to find out, but it will likely be a long time before we hear back on the matter.
Open Letter to Purdue Fans
If you want to prove that you got what it take to do this twice, well, here is a Boilermaker Special VII. Dr. San Miguel, you are free to use it if you so choose.
What follows is the 10k report that I write every week. This is an analysis of the top projects on Cuusoo and how quickly they are getting to the 10k mark. As you can see, most will take years to do so, and these are the most supported projects on Cuusoo. Please take a moment of your time to take a look at them and spread some support around.
Not convinced you will find something on interest? How about an example of a set that does Purdue proud. Neil Armstrong is an alumnus of Purdue, why not help immortalize his famous mission in Lego by supporting the Apollo 11 Lunar Mission
Cheers!
Glenbricker
Approaching 1k Milestone
Hardsuits passed the 1k mark this very day and of course Purdue Pete just blew past it all together.
Deadline Review
The next review is December 3rd, 2012...that is 39 days from today. Any project that does not make it to the December
3rd deadline will have to wait another 3 months to even get started.Don't like how slow a project is going?
Give it some indirect support to help speed things up. This link has plenty of examples how.Days to 10K
Not on the List? First, I tend to cut off projects after a certain day count, usually 10k. Additionally, I only monitor projects that have at least 200. Projects less than that are a little too volatile for proper assessment. Finally, I track several weeks worth of data to get these numbers, so you might not show up until your project has been post 200 for a few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment