FunCom Meeting 2

Time

Proposed date: Tuesday Aug 22nd. 2006

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

Proposed location: IRC channel #osgeo

Agenda

• Approve minutes for First Meeting.
• Review Budget 2006-2007.
• Discuss CafePress shirt sales, and price point.
• 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. 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.

• Prepare Income Projection for Rich so he can submit this with the 501(c)3 filing.

Minutes

Attending: Dave McIlhagga, Arnulf Christl, Michael Gerlek, Frank Warmerdam

• Previous meeting minutes not approved since none were written.
• Poor attendance noted (only two actual committee members here). It was observed that Alain isn't subscribed to the list ... Frank to follow up with him.
• Agreed to aim for roughly $5 profit on cafepress (possibly prorated somewhat to item cost).
• Michael Gerlek was appointed to the Fundraising Committee, and designated official shirt sales person (ie. in charge of the cafepress stuff).
• Dave agreed to have someone from DM Solutions (who worked on the maptools.org cafepress site) help Michael with the OSGeo cafepress site design.
• Discussed how to provide shirts for folks that get a Supporting Membership. Michael will look into ways of handling this conveniently via cafepress or lands end web site.
• It was noted that no one "owns" the membership issue. Dave will raise this issue with the board.
• Sponsorship price points discussed. Suggested low end of $500 was considered to "high overhead" for the return. Going with something like 2.5K, 10K, and 50K.
• It was agreed to split the sponsorship proposal into two portions. One going all to the foundation as a whole, and aimed at marketing departments. Another that is project focused, and aimed more at development/user organizations. Dave will work on the marketing sponsorship, and Frank the project focused sponsorship.
• Discussed whether we need to give everyone a chance to be an initial sponsor. No one felt a strong need for this. Better to just start accepting and announcing sponsorships.
• Income Projection document was generally considered ok.
• Meet again next week to discuss the split sponsorship documents.