About

This is an idea that came up during the IJBC in Israel in 2004. The staff had asked participants to bring CISV shirts for an exhibition during AIM. Some people (James/USA, Per/SWE and others) thought, how cool would it be, if we would create an online archive with all the shirts that were ever printed in CISV. So from January 2005 we set up a weblog and started posting pictures there. We advertised the site through CISV-L and the IJB website and - hooray - more and more people started contributing pictures. In 2010 we stripped down the Shirt archive to the pure essentials, taking away some of the features such a voting on popular shirts in order to make the website easier to manage.

Purpose

When James and Nick discussed the idea in the beginning, the main purpose was FUN. Both of them were CISV-crazy enough, that they find it fanscinating, just to see all those different shirts that people created. Besides the ones that they had seen worn by other CISVers they were also curious to discover really old CISV shirts. But the T-shirt site is also meaningful in other ways:

• Archiving all shirts ist just another way of demonstrating a part of the CISV culture. It's part of the CISV identity, of our culture, creating new shirts every year and trading them during camp time.
• CISV's shirt designers deserve a place where their work is archived and honoured. And for future designers this is a place to find inspiration what to and maybe also what not to create.
• Having people check the website on a regular basis, voting and commenting on shirts is another way of creating a year-long CISV community.
• Some of the contributed pictures can be used for (on- and offline) CISV publications.
• Once we have enough pictures here, we would like to create a "meta-shirt": A shirt with pictures of other CISV-shirts on it.

Who's behind the site?

The T-shirts archive is currently curated by Denise in the IO. From 2005 to 2010 the site was run by Nick/GER, who now happily focuses his online creativity on his Balcony Blog.