[OSGeo-Board] opening and organizing

[Gary Lang]

As I asked yesterday, if folks would send me a list of the things they're working on, it'd be great.

My main thoughts on your Wiki page are that it discusses a framework for people sponsoring, which is great. We also need to discuss the motivations of the sponsor and how we can serve those motivations. Put another way, why would someone put in $27K? What do they get? We could focus on some of those things.

As a lateral thinking exercise, what would cause someone not to want to sponsor us? Then we can focus on not doing those things.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From:	Frank Warmerdam on behalf of Frank Warmerdam (External)
Sent:	Mon 3/6/2006 10:37 PM
To:	board at board.osgeo.org
Cc:	
Subject:	Re: [OSGeo-Board] opening and organizing

Gary Lang wrote:
> As we discussed on the phone, I wasn't advocating a "big 
 > task matrix" (if I look at what I wrote, that doesn't appear),
 > just that we track things so that know what we're doing. A simple
 > page listing ongoing activities will suffice.

Gary,

I'm convinced. Should would you like to start it in the wiki?
Once I have an idea of the granularity you are aiming for, I
am willing to extend it as I can.

> Also as I said on the phone, if we are serious about getting 
 > people besides ADSK interested in sponsorship, we will have to
 > have a better answer for people who want to know what we do than
 > "go subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists". They should be able to
 > go to one or two pages and see what we are doing.

We will definitely do better than just having ADSK sponsoring.
I am confident that I can raise $25K in sponsorships within a
couple months of our establishing a sponsorship program.  With
some luck and leverage perhaps more like $50K.   Whether we can
raise the $200K to $400K per year we want for robust operation
however will depend on our selling our value proposition, not just
me calling in personal favors.

I would add that only ADSK has put in money so far because we haven't
asked for sponsorship from anyone else yet.  One lesson I took from
Ed M's email after the initial announcement was that a sponsorship
program needs to be rolled out in such a way that everyone wanting
to get aboard has an equal opportunity to do so in the "first splash".
I also don't want to start going around begging for money till I
have the sponsorship deal clear, and am ready to explain the value.

My thoughts on fundraising are available at:
   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Fundraising

Feel free to add thoughts in the discussion area or here on this list.
If you have time, it would be very helpful to have you involved in
the fundraising committee when it is launched.  I have put this on
the agenda for Friday, though I haven't yet written up a motion so I
have some homework to do still.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
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    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org


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