Next summer, Random House will publish the UK edition of Crowdsourcing, Wired writer Jeff Howe's upcoming book on the new internet revolution driven by the combined power of the masses. In the spirit of the book, we are opening up its UK cover design to the world...

Howe defines Crowdsourcing as "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call". So that's what Random House and Creative Review are doing. In our Coversourcing competition, we want you, our readers, to create the cover design for the UK edition of Crowdsourcing. The winning design will be printed on the UK edition.

Ideally, we'd like the winning design to be a group effort, in the spirit of the book. So if you want to collaborate with other artists and designers - illustrators, photographers, typographers - we heartily recommend it. You may do this with friends, colleagues, or you may prefer to use Creative Commons-licensed material from Flickr or any number of websites. We certainly encourage you to do the same back and make your work available under CC for others to build upon. If you do want to share your source files, please upload the source files to an external service, such as Box, and put the link and your preferred credit in the notes for your entry on Flickr. And if you do use someone else’s work - please make sure you credit it correctly in the notes as well.

Entrants need to submit designs via their personal Flickr stream. There is no limit to the number of entries you can make.

In order to be submitted to the competition, the image needs to be tagged “coversourcing” in Flickr. Any image tagged “coversourcing” will be picked up and turned into an entry here - the competition site created by Apt, who came up with the original idea, with design by TenAndAHalf, programming by James Bridle.

Visitors to this site can also vote for their favourite designs to form a shortlist of entrants which will be taken forward to a panel vote to decide the final jacket. As entries come in, we will post updates here on the CR Blog (keep an eye on the Coversourcing category).

The panel will consist of the following people:

Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and WIRED Editor
Richard Ogle, Random House Art Director
Patrick Burgoyne, Editor, Creative Review
Angus Hyland, Partner, Pentagram Design UK

The chosen jacket design will be printed on all UK editions of Crowdsourcing, which will be available in bookshops from August 2008.

Each book will be highlighted as the very first ‘crowdsourced’ book jacket and the successful winning entrant will be presented with a signed first edition of the title and framed artwork along with a cash prize of £500.

Thanks to Adam Humphrey at Random House.

Read Howe's original Crowdsourcing article here