[Fundraising] First Meeting - May 9th

[Dave McIlhagga]

Frank,

Good thoughts - and your concerns reflect my own as well - I do have a 
couple of ideas on how we might be able to make this work though -- see 
below:


Frank Warmerdam wrote:
 >
> 1) I think it mainly will be attractive to services firms working
> with OSGeo software who will benefit from such a listing.  So it
> is good for consultants, and integrators.  But it doesn't do much
> for end user organizations (like governments, NGOs, commercial
> users of the software).

In general I agree with this, however if we leave the descriptive space 
flexible for an organization to put forward their own message around 
their adoption and support of open source, this would provide marketing 
benefits for them.

Obviously - we would need to have some room to Veto -- if the message is 
'Open Source Sucks' that might not be the sponsor we really want. ;)

I would also stress that this is a means of soliciting sponsorship over 
and above the reasons you had previously highlighted.


> 2) I'm a wee bit nervous about companies without appropriate competency
> buying prominent support from OSGeo but not being able to deliver.

We would need to be careful to ensure that sponsorship of OSGeo does NOT 
result in endorsement by OSGeo of a firm's competency, capabilities, 
etc... I think we would also want to make this very clear on our 
website, that we thank our sponsors, but in no way endorse use of their 
services ... big difference.


> 3) For the sake of promoting open source software I think it is going to
> be important for us to list consulting organizations.  I am nervous about
> only listing those who pay-to-play as it will reduce the apparently 
> available
> number of consultants.

Again, for this reason, I would suggest that at a project's dicretion, 
it may wish to include a listing of consulting organizations around the 
technology. No sponsorship should be required for this. This could be 
wide-open, or could be somehow 'certified' -- but I would hope this is 
left to the discretion of the individual project PSCs since every 
project will be quite different.


> Now, oddly enough, I was thinking about this very issue a bunch last night
> and this morning.  And my thinking was that we should provide a consultant
> / integrator listing service that anyone can get a listing on for free
> (perhaps subject to some judgement on whether they are legit).  But that
> we would offer preferential placement, amounts of text and logo size for
> sponsors.
> 
> With the above caveats, I certainly think that promotion/marketing
> is the best angle for getting sponsorships from services organizations.

My sense is you would want to keep these two components very distinct, 
so as not to confuse a general listing of consultants (who to some 
degree are then endorsed/recognized by a project/OSGeo) and Sponsors, 
where we make it very clear that it is without endorsement by OSGeo. For 
sponsors the message is 'thanks for your money and support, here's your 
15 minutes of fame, now let us get back to work'.


I think one thing we all want to be sensitive to is $$$ via Sponsorship 
should not influence OSGeo -- it is and needs to remain arm's length 
from any organization. But with clear rules around sponsorship, I think 
we can get some significant sustainable funding that can form win-wins 
for the sponsors, OSGeo and it's projects.

Dave