[Fundraising] Prospects of fundraising for an Exec Director...

[Jo Walsh]

dear Dave, mpg, all,
On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 09:58:46AM -0400, Dave McIlhagga wrote:
> I think there are a lot of organizations out there who are very good 
> prospects for supporting the Foundation, but it will be unlikely to come 
> our way until we have a solid, professional image to present and 
> evidence that we have our act together on the website and in our 
> direction as an organization.
> 
> Something we're collectively discovering is how difficult it can be to 
> achieve all of this without a coordinating person dedicated to the effort.

Oh; the interconnectedness of all things! So when you go to a
potential sponsoring organisation; of course the first thing they do
is go look at http://www.osgeo.org/ , and the first impression they
get from there, influences the response completely. There's all this
great material building up in the VisCom library; momentum on
incubation, and good public governance and maintenance, within OSGeo
projects is really building; I like to think that the wider community is
talking a lot more because of OSGeo; but this isn't coming up to the surface.

Here are my hippie sentiments; before OSGeo-we can be right with the world, 
we have to be right with ourselves. If "we have our act together" for
each other, that will be evidence to the outside world that OSGeo is
generally a good thing, worth supporting the bootstrap efforts of.

23:08 < spatialguru> maybe we are collaborative community 2.0 ;)
23:08 < spatialguru> and need new tools, or tools at least implemented
in a different way.
23:08 < hobu> I think that the tools a community uses to do its
business are part of the DNA of the project and shape how it develops
 
What I would quite like to try out is this: 

Start a community.osgeo.org site, at telascience, based on an installation 
of http://www.civicspacelabs.com/ , a drupal distribution specialised for 
information-sharing within non-profit communities. I'm no drupalguru,
but I've found it really easy to get fairly sophisticated sites off
the ground with very quickly in the past (like 2 days...).
Pile it up with the good content from the www.osgeo site as it stands
now; ask SAC to figure out if it'll work with LDAP; and try it out on
the membership. I wouldn't see this as a be-all end-all solution to
our content management / public face issues, but as a quick-fix that
WebCom-we can put positive energy into.

If it works out, it could be a replacement for the front-end of
www.osgeo - it can link through to the mailing list archives at CN -
and we can encourage people to use the plain-mail EZMLM interface to
list subscription. If it doesn't work out, then we'll have learned
something. :) I have a good amount of free time at the moment, and i
can't think of a better way to use it for OSGeo - especially if
getting this sorted out *is* the key to reassuring the existing
membership, reaching out to new or vacillating people, and producing
something that we could be - if not proud, at least not slightly
ashamed ;) - to present to potential sponsors.

Is this making sense?   


jo