Dear Digital Open Community:

We are pleased to announce the winners for the first even Digital Open. 

1) NAME:  ALEXIS MCADAMS 

PROJECT: "Dioractive" (USA / Lombard, IL).

2) NAME:  BRENNON WILLIAMS 

PROJECT: "BW Science Labs" (USA / Hillsborough, CA).

3) NAME:  CARLOS ANDRES  

PROJECT: "Making Free Software Profitable" (Argentina/Colombia)

4) NAME:  HARRY LEE 

PROJECT: "Sneaky Card"  (Australia).

5) NAME:  FUNKY SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS

PROJECT: "Hybrid Airship" (USA / Fremont, CA).

6) NAME: FERRAN ROVIRA BOSCA

PROJECT: "Casa Ecologica" (Spain).

7) NAME:  NICK BRENN 

PROJECT: "NGB Enterprises - Electronikits" (USA / Kennett Square, PA).

8) NAME:  RAYMOND ZHONG 

PROJECT: "Centralized Student Website" (USA / Fremont, CA).

Below is the video profile of the first winner, stay tuned for interviews with all of our winners in the coming days.

The Digital Open has received an overwhelmingly positive response from around the world, receiving 82 projects from more than a dozen countries!

By popular demand, the Digital Open Bonus Round—beginning today—gives existing and new entrants an extra 12 days to develop and polish their projects. Our stewards and the Digital Open team are going to ramp up our comments and interactions with contestants, to help you make your projects as strong as possible for the judges. During these extra couple of weeks, we also encourage you to submit any and all new projects you might have, or even form new collaborations with other participants.

August 27 will be the final deadline for project submissions, and winners will be announced in October with the public release of Boing Boing Video's profiles of the winning projects.

Thanks for your interest in the Digital Open: an Innovation Expo for Global Youth!

Do not wait until the last minute to submit your project! The final deadline for submissions is August 15, 2009, but projects posted before the deadline will benefit significantly from feedback from the Digital Open community.

We are giving away more than $15,000 worth of very cool prizes including laptops, video cameras, recycled billboard backpacks, solar-powered gear and more. We've already received 49 projects from eight countries: Argentina, Canada, India, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the UK and the US!

Remember that the Digital Open is more than just a contest—it's also a community. You can build a reputation among peers and draw attention to your own work by winning portable digital badges for taking a quiz or writing an essay about open innovation or even by collaborating with others and giving good feedback!

The future is yours to make! Get started at http://digitalopen.org

Featured Innovators: TakingITGlobal – Jennifer Corriero & Michael Furdyk

Before they were old enough to vote, Jennifer Corriero and Michael Furdyk had already started TakingITGlobal, a unique social network and online community of young social entrepreneurs working to make the world a better place.

Founded in 1999, the organization now has more than 260,000 members from 261 countries and the founders can boast having received almost every award you can possibly think of for their work.

How did they do it? About 5 years ahead of their time, they brought together funds from Michael’s recently sold startup, MyDesktop.com, and provided and provided a Facebook-style online community to the world’s tech-savvy youth in 2000.

Watch the video above and learn more at TakingITGlobal.org

screened last week in San Francisco and I had the privilege of meeting afterwards with Brett Gaylor, the film's Director. The film was a nearly decade-long project developed under the title of "Open Source Cinema" and Gaylor actively recruited remote collaborators to download his footage, remix it, and re-upload it to his website.

Today, with the support of the Canadian Film Board, he has done a major theatrical release and won prizes in film festivals around the globe. You can actually remix his work right now on his website. Watch this trailer and check it out. This type of project was one of the inspirations behind the Digital Open's Open Media category and I would love to see projects taking a similarly innovative approach to media work..

We've had a number of questions from users who are wondering about whether projects need to be fully complete at the time of submission to the Digital Open.

Since you can now edit your projects after you've submitted them, please don't worry about it being 100% done.  In fact, the earlier you submit, the more our friendly stewards can help you revise and refine your ideas! If you are submitting an incomplete idea, the only thing we ask is that you enter some information (3-4 sentences at a minimum) about what your project is, and how you plan to complete it.

So that the project is eligible for an award, please make sure that you edit the project before the 15th to provide all relevant text, along with any videos, pictures, demos, or anything else that shows off your submission.

We are really pleased to see the projects rolling in, and we are looking forward to seeing what you all come up with in the coming weeks!

As promised, we have randomly selected 5 site users who submitted projects on or before the July 25 deadline

Congratulations to the following users, soon to be proud owners of brand new Flip Video Ultra 60 minute digital camcorders.

sciguy77

nicolas.dato

iPavel

omega_platypus

manugill1995

Thanks to everyone who participated in the early entry extravaganza - in the past few weeks we have seen a tripling of the number of project submissions! For those who didn't win, don't dismay - there are still lots of prizes left so keep your projects coming in!

A reminder: only 1 day left in the Early Entry Prize Extravaganza.

Tomorrow, July 24th, we are going to be giving away 5 brand new Flip Video Ultra 60 minute digital camcorders.

All that you need to do to be eligible to enter in the draw for one of the beautiful new Flips is to enter your project into the Digital Open. Really, its that simple! Although you can enter more than one project, your name will be entered into the draw only one time.

Remember, you can now edit your projects after you've submitted them, so you don't have to worry about it being 100% done.  In fact, the earlier you submit, the more our friendly stewards can help you revise and refine your ideas! The only thing we ask is that you enter some information (3-4 sentences at a minimum) about what your project is, and how you plan to complete it -- projects that are just a title and "more to come" will not be entered in the draw.

So what are you waiting for? Go submit a project!

The Digital Open Team

We know how it is: you want to submit a project, but you keep putting it off because, hey, the deadline is over a month away!

To help you get a jump on submitting our project, on July 24th we are going to be giving away 5 brand new Flip Video Ultra 60 minute digital camcorders.

All that you need to do to be eligible to enter in the draw for one of the beautiful new Flips is to enter your project into the Digital Open. Really, its that simple!

Remember, you can now edit your projects after you've submitted them, so you don't have to worry about it being 100% done. In fact, the earlier you submit, the more our friendly stewards can help you revise and refine your ideas!

So what are you waiting for? Go submit a project!

The Digital Open Team

At the request of several users, you can now edit submitted projects up until the close date of the competition! Because of this chane, we encourage users to post projects-in-progress and share with us your creative process. Feel free to date updates, or, even better, use the Notes feature to blog about your progress and link to the posts from your project page. We hope that this change in functionality will encourage more users to start sharing their projects, and give you another reason to play with the site!