OK so that title was long winded

Anyway moving on, I myself am an aspiring 3D artist/programmer and have recently been looking ways to practice my skills. At first i went about attempting to recruiting any hand drawn art inclined friends to draw me some turnaround character concept art but that didn't turn out well. So then my thoughts turned to the other humongous community i belonged to, the internet. I assumed there would be some freely available character concepts or concept art of any kind that would suit my purpose, in short i couldn't find any.

So then my mind wandered and I thought of organizing something here on gamedev, a thread to collect people who needed to practice their work. My thoughts are this, we collect artists of any kind, designers, sound artists, programmers, anyone, who wants to practice their skills without being part of a full fledged team. Anyone can take parts of their work and use it for their own. A programmer who wants to make a small RPG game takes the sound artists work and the 3d artists models and puts it together, other programmers can take and recycle some of his work and do their own stuff. We need to create an environment where hobbyists can work as effectively as full teams.

This was just an idea and i was wondering about its viability, if anything of the sort already exists, and most of all would you guys be interested in it.

Daedalus

That's more or less the motivation behind the GDNet Marketplace.

Ok but looking at the market place it seems to be more like individuals selling their works. What i am thinking of is more based around open collaboration. This market place seems more based around selling of assets, while what I imagined would be selling/sharing of ideas and concepts.

Ideas and concepts have no value; there is no market for them. Finished work (i.e. assets) is actually worth something.

This was just an idea and i was wondering about its viability, if anything of the sort already exists, and most of all would you guys be interested in it.

Just trying to figure out how to categorize this. This isn't a technical question so it doesn't belong in For Beginners - the viability bit almost approaches a business question - I guess where this should go, then, is the Lounge.

I thought it should go in for beginners since it was a question about helping beginners. Which leads me to my next point, while ideas may have no monetary value there is still an importance in sharing them. If you post an idea for a concept i.e concept art as an asset that gives some one else he chance to work on their skills based upon that Concept/assets. This way you could organize a large group of hobbyists into a sort of pseudo team. You get where I am coming form?

I could see getting something together with a combination of GDNet Marketplace, Github, and the Cloud9 IDE.

Make sure you get the licensing right up-front - preferably using Free/Open Source licenses, as these are the ones designed to allow people to collaborate and use other people's work in the manner you describe. (It seems obvious, but there are a lot of sites I see where people release work "for free" with some custom written licence that in practice ends up being incompatible both for commercial and Open Source use, or don't have a licence at all - a lot of the material of GameDev's assets seems to suffer from this. GameDev also seems to have no way to sort or search by licence type?)

Also you might want to check out the site Open Game Art, where this kind of discussion and exchange of work goes on, and everything collected on the site has clear Free/Open Source licenses.

(I'm answering the idea of sharing code and media, as you suggest in the first post. The later post of sharing ideas is perhaps less useful than actual creative work. Admittedly it wouldn't be a bad idea to have somewhere for people to suggest and discuss game ideas - either ideas for a whole game, or smaller ideas for specific features in some kind of game. Sometimes you see these kinds of discussions on forums, but I don't know if you could get a specific site for it - and there'd be a lot of rubbish to wade through. In this case, I'd personally make it clear that any idea submitted is public domain, to avoid people who think that ideas are important trying to claim they "own" an idea that they posted.)

Wow.

That site you mentioned (opengameart.org) is a gem mine!

Im very happy I strolled upon this thread. I will definitely use content from there. Thnx! More ontopic it also seems to be what the OP is looking for (or at least very close).

If someone wanted to make a web-system like this, they might want to look at the Amazon Mechanical Turk API -- they've already built a huge system for crowdsourcing work items.