[OSGeo-Board] New Wiki Documents: Mission, FAQ, Fund Raising

[Frank Warmerdam]

Gary Lang wrote:
> In general, we need to have a discussion about the benefits of being:
> 
> a) a sponsor
> b) a member
> c) a hosted project
> 
> and how these are wrapped with funding goals. 
> 
> In terms of sponsors, another way of putting this need is to be able to answer this question: "What makes the foundation an attractive one for potential sponsors?" An identical question could be asked for each of a), b), and c).

Gary,

Off the cuff I would respond:

Sponsor:
  o There is a public relations benefit to being a sponsor.  I think the
    broader geospatial user community has some awareness of open source
    packages and will look favourable on organizations that help support
    those packages.  The greater the user penetration of our packages the
    greater the PR benefit of sponsorship.

  o Sponsorship helps support the packages and overall open source geospatial
    community that many organizations are coming to depend on to lesser or
    greater degrees.  Making work on these packages sustainable helps ensure
    those packages will be there for the sponsor in the future.  This is
    proportionally important depending on how much the sponsor depends on the
    package(s) in question.

  o The sponsor gains some degree of "soft influence" with project developers
    by being a project or foundation sponsor.  I know that on behalf of the
    GDAL/OGR project I would tend to be more aggressive in dealing with bug
    reports or feature requests from a substantial sponsor.

Member (voting):
  o A voting member has a say in keeping the foundation honest (as that person
    see honest).
  o A voting member potentially has greater influence over areas of focus and
    effort for the foundation.
  o Being a member selected by your peers provides a certain degree of
    increased credibility for the person.  This could be useful in getting a
    full time job, or consulting contracts.

A hosted project:
  o gets some provided infrastructure, though for the most part such
    infrastructure is cheap or free already.  We would need to convince people
    we do this very well for this to be a significant factor.
  o provides legal protection for developers.
  o has a greater credibility with users for having been accepted by the
    foundation.  How valuable this is will depend in part on the degree of
    quality and credibility people find existing foundation projects to have.
  o appears more open to new developers and users due to enforced PMC process.
  o has a mechanism to collect funding and greater leverage than a free
    standing project to do this.

For me with GDAL/OGR, the greater sense of credibility and substance is the
most important factor.

> A good subject for the next board meeting, because it drives/forces us to define a lot of things.

This feels like a pretty open ended topic for a board meeting.  I don't
think we need to get hung up on the benefits to members, since we don't
seem to have much problem soliciting members.   We certainly need to ensure
that we provide useful benefits to projects, but we seem on track for
that.  But if we want to raise on the order of $200000/yr we will need to
work on benefits for sponsors.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent