I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

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I realize that being a Radiohead fan doesn’t make me unique. But one of it’s benefits is that it allows me to get emails like this one below. I love that this band is pushing co-creation and what it means to collaborate.

To celebrate this week’s single release (we still have those in England) Radiohead have broken up the song ‘Nude’ into pieces for you to remix.

For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, you can buy the separate components or ’stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums) and remix your own version of the song. You can do this by adding your own beats and instrumentation or just remixing the original parts. More information here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/

You can buy the stems here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/buy/

You can upload your finished mixes here http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged and even voted on by ‘the public’.
You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too.

Hope you enjoy it

Does the fact that they’ve broken the “stems” up for easy hacking make remixing any less cool? Not in my opinion. I’m just excited to see artists doing what I hope to see more and more from designers.

It’s always fun to see how advertising jumps in the game of co-creation. Votervoter.com, which is run by Wide Orbit, is an interesting take on using YouTube-like participation. It allows you to create and publish your own political ads targeted to long tail segments.

I’m curious to see if they’ll be able to make money by most of what YouTube offers for free. I want to think they’ll succeed, but as I was forced to enter all of my information, phone number, etc, just to register, I bailed out. I get enough junk mail as it is.