[OSGeo-Board] opening and organizing

[Frank Warmerdam]

Gary Lang wrote:
> 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,

Well:

1) If the "foundation" takes political or ideological positions way beyond
    our scope.  For instance, participating in "America out of Iraq day".

2) Being overtly anti-corporate.

3) Making negative statements about other organizations (ie. ESRI is evil,
    no one should use microsoft windows, OGC is useless and a big money
    racket).  (/me wouldn't care to have those examples show up in a google
    archive!)

The above basically fall into the making ourselves look bad.  Basically
making association with us have negative PR value.

I think companies will also not want to sponsor us if they see us as
directly competing with them.  So:

5) Pushing products that directly compete with potential sponsor products.

6) Trying to dismantle expensive data monopolies.

The above are basically cases that we are going to have to live with.  Our
goal is to produce and promote open source software.  In some cases that
will directly complete with some software vendors and we may just have to
write them off as sponsors.  But at least we shouldn't go out of our way to
target existing sponsor's products for replacement.

Likewise, we take it as a basic goal that there needs to be a reasonable
body of public geodata for use.  This may put us at odds with some
organizations, such as the Ordnance Survey and thus they might not sponsor
us (even though from other angles our software might help promote use of
their data).  To some extent we just have to accept this and move on. But
we also need to accept a place in the ecology for proprietary data providers.

7) Because they figure we will fulfill our mission which they agree with
    whether they sponsor us or not.  (The free rider problem).

Here we need to find other angles for why they should sponsor.  ie. PR benefit
or their having more input on project directions.

8) Because we seem out of touch with the potential sponsors needs.

While I am loath to have sponsors dictate to projects, I think projects
wanting sponsorship are going to have to go out of their way to be responsive
to sponsors.  I am unlikely to blow off a sponsors request without at least
some consideration and a good reason.

I'm sure others can come up with reasons too.

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    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org