[OSGeo-Discuss] Return on Equity

[Dave Patton]

Howard Butler wrote:

> Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer 
> efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones.  The OSGeo Journal 
> effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's 
> efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the lights 
> on for developer tools like Subversion/Trac have been volunteer 
> enterprises (please help flesh out this list, these are only those I am 
> most aware of, I know there have been many others).  However, I think 
> financial resources, both in the capacity to generate sponsorship money 
> and the ability to spend it wisely, are what provides the opportunity to 
> set OSGeo apart and provide the volunteerism leverage.

> When Autodesk came in and helped bootstrap OSGeo, it was fairly clear 
> that our financial existence would not be an indefinite expenditure -- 
> we would have to exist on our own.  Additionally, to meet 503c3 
> requirements, we cannot have a situation where we have a majority 
> benefactor as we do now.  We're almost two years down the road into 
> bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very 
> little.  As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship 
> dollars beyond Autodesk are the "targeted development" vehicles like 
> those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL.

There has certainly been a lot of volunteer effort by the organizers
of the FOSS4G 2007 conference, and the efforts of those volunteers will
continue through to the end of the conference, when the ball gets
picked up by the organizers of next year's conference.

The actual dollar number that you come up with will depend on various
factors, but you can argue that both the 500+ registrants for the
conference, and the conference's Sponsors/Exhibitors are all
contributing financially to OSGeo.

The Sponsors presumably wouldn't be spending money on the conference
if they didn't see value for their companies. Maybe it's an opportunity
for the new board to frame some questions at their meeting the day
before the conference, and to ask those questions of Sponsors during
the conference, to try and facilitate future opportunities for OSGeo
sponsorship by a variety of corporations, in a variety of ways.

-- 
Dave Patton

Degree Confluence Project:
Canadian Coordinator
Technical Coordinator
http://www.confluence.org/

FOSS4G2007:
Workshop Committee
Conference Committee
http://www.foss4g2007.org/

Personal website:
Maps, GPS, etc.
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/