Talk:Fundraising

Will there be an option for additional sponsorship levels?

As a municipality, we have membership in the OGC http://www.opengeospatial.org/about/?page=levels for $500/year. I could justify this expense to our taxpayers, where I'm not sure that initially I will be able to justify a higher level of membership.

The OGC model is a bit too fine-grained, and is more "membership" oriented, but overall I think it does a pretty good job of identifying the pain points for various organisations.

Jason

Jason, I wouldn't have an objection to other sponsorship levels, but we do need to balance the return against the admin overhead in administering. Also, since we have sponsorship instead of membership I wonder if this will make it hard to sell to organizations such as municipal governments. This is something I don't have a good sense of. --Warmerda 15:53, 6 March 2006 (CET)

Sponsorship levels
The Fundraising defines an upper limit which is not really necessary. Additionally it prevents individuals, freeelancers and really small cap companies from appearing at a higher level, even although theymight shove a high percentage of their revenue into OSGeo. For any large corporation these amounts are peanuts. How does this sponsoring go together with explicitly funding individual OSGeo-projects?

Arnulf, the sponsorship program presented is predicated on several levels related to specific dollar amounts so we can attach some sort of increasing positive karma to higher levels. We could certainly have even higher levels of sponsorship, but I'm not convinced higher levels are likely to be used. I set the rough current levels based on amounts that OGC charges, and on what I thought might be achievable from different organizations.

As for the top level being peanuts for a large company, that is true. But our initial budget concept (aiming for roughly $200K/yr that isn't dedicated to a particular project) suggests to me we don't have a compelling need for big $100k sugar-daddies. And for the health of the organization I think I would prefer many somewhat more modestly contributing sponsors rather than one or two monsters who will be perceived as being "in control".

If we do have companies wanting to make a really large contribution, in some ways I would prefer they do it in other ways, such as in-kind contributions to projects (ie. manpower).

It is true that an individual consultant, or a small company is unlikely to appear at the top sponsorship level. Were you thinking here ought to be a sliding scale of price for sponsorship levels based on organization size? Like was done with FOSS4G? I am personally not keen on this idea because I think the higher levels are already offering little enough concrete benefit over lower levels. Letting little guys get it cheap will just be one more reason for the big guys to not bother. But I'm not stuck on my position.

You asked how does this sponsorship go with explicitly funding OSGeo projects. I assume you mean contributions like directly funding a developer to implement something? It was my intention that we not consider this "sponsorship" in the sense of this sponsorship program. Partly I take that position because otherwise it will be hard to get organizations interested in paying cash for sponsorship when the "in kind" contributors are likely to dwarf them in sponsorship level.

Basically, the assumption is that direct project support is already being done for reasons that companies find valid, and that this will continue. But that the sponsorship program is a way of raising general funding for the foundation and projects that can be applied in the ways that the board, or projects see as most valuable.

That said, I am not adverse to projects giving credit to all sorts of contributors, not just cash sponsors. But I think we need some sort of mechanism to make cash sponsorship appealing.

--Warmerda 00:05, 16 March 2006 (CET)

Frank, not really sure on the membership/sponsorship thing.

I think it would be good for the foundation to have a mechanism for allowing organisations (not just individuals) to become members. It would have to be a pretty limited form of membership though; basically just a badge. This could be used by the foundation to show the broad range of support for OSGeo, and would assist in the marketing effort. It could also be used by the "member" organisation to show support for open source geospatial apps.

We already have language in specific RFPs stating that our community is a member of the OGC, and preference will be given to vendors that incorporate OGC standards in their solutions. While I don't think that I could swing that kind of language for OSGeo (not enough people convinced that open source is always more cost-effective than proprietary apps) I think it would be great if we had some way of indicating that we are OSGeo-friendly, other than just my work.

Jason