On November 5 we started a photographic project, with users of guardian.co.uk and of Flickr, entitled A Message for Obama. The essence of the idea was to see if we could capture reaction to Barack Obama's presidential victory in a creative way. It started with a few of us taking pictures around the Guardian offices, and snowballed into a Flickr picture group which you can see here.
Just to push the boundaries of collaborative content creation and publishing technologies a little further, we wondered if we could produce a rapid Message for Obama book (a handy inauguration gift for the new President?), using a selection of photos from the pool.
Meg Pickard, our head of communities, approached the users whose images we chose for the book and obtained their permission. With the help of Roger Tooth, the Guardian's head of photography, we compiled a book using on-demand publisher Blurb's software, and this afternoon we are pushing the button on the project.
You can buy a copy of Message for Obama from Blurb, and we will be donating a share of the profits to our Katine project to promote development in Uganda. It is a highly experimental project for us, using content-gathering and publishing techniques we have never tried before. Please let us know what you think of the results.
You can also, of course, buy other Guardian books.
