Making it easy to recognise users has many advantages in different situations. Representing users with an image can be useful for people to better identify users in contribution, discussions, etc. and also to better convey the idea of a human being being at the other side of the screen.

In our context there are some challenges to consider related to the use of free educational images in our projects.These are some I recall from previous discussions on the topic:

• A new image contribution workflow requires a process to curate those images and check their license information.
• People are used to upload non-free (e.g., their favourite actor) and non-educational (e.g., their selfie) images.
• People uploading pictures of themselves may not understand the consequences of releasing those images under a public license (they can be reused).

Those issues maybe solvable, but I wanted to share also ideas on alternatives for user customised avatars that do not involve image uploading.

One possible approach is to let users pick an emoji icon to represent them. The system can allow also to pick the color or use different colors to make sure that different users in the same context (e.g., in the same discussion) are represented differently enough from each other. As a fallback users can be represented by the first character of their username.

The example below is based on the Noto Emoji monochrome font: