FunComMeeting1

Time

Proposed date: Tuesday May 9th. 2006

Proposed time: 1600 UTC (noon EST, 9:00am PST)

Proposed location: IRC channel #osgeo

Agenda

• Add new members to the committee (Dave Mclhagga, R. Paul Warriner, Alain Grignon).
• Discuss fundraising approaches other than sponsorship.
• Discuss Sponsorship, prepare plan for revision and approval.

1. Have we picked appropriate price points? Are discrete sponsorship levels the way to go?
2. Are there ways we can name and position the sponsorship program to make it easier for friendly folks in organizations to sell it to management? (ie. "maintenance fees" are a well understand cost item in most orgs).
3. When we first floated the mapserver foundation idea Ed stressed the importance to potential sponsors to get in on the first big press deluge to get the most value out of a sponsorship. Obviously we are to late for that for OSGeo, but should we be making sure that anyone that wants to has a chance to get into the first big sponsorship press release? (ie. founding sponsors) rather than starting to get sponsorships in a trickle.
4. Much of my thinking has been around positioning sponsorship as a way for organizations reliant on foundation projects to providing sustaining financing to improve the core quality of the software with a hint of preferrential support access, with promotional benefit thrown in for good measure. Do we really need two programs? One aimed at those wanting a promotional benefit (perhaps not project specific?) and another that is a bit like a support/maintenance contract without much in the way of guaranteed service levels?
5. How do we organize our approach to organizations so as not to mess things up. I'm a bit nervous about a bunch of folks running around bugging companies without a unified sales job, possibly giving a negative impression of the foundation. How do we avoid that?
6. How soon do we want a sponsorship program up and running? I must admit to be eager, though you might not be able to tell that from my level of activity in leading this committee! In particular, I'm eager to start approaching my clients for OSGeo sponsorships (oriented to supporting GDAL) so I can turn some of that money around into a maintainence contract for GDAL over the summer. I have someone in mind that I'm paying out of my own pocket through May.
7. Assuming we allow project directed sponsorship, what sorts of controls should we be putting into place on PSC's spending their dedicated funds to ensure the use is responsible? I think sponsors will expect the foundation to ensure orderly and responsible use of the money.