On 11/16/06, Louis Suarez-Potts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 2006-11-15, at 18:45 , Kaj Kandler wrote:
...
> The very same is true for businesses in other countries. $100/yr does
> sound not too much for a US or Belgian business. However in Brazil it
...
> I also can see that someone might offer support and not charge for it,
> such as retired professionals consulting for not for profit
> organizations or schools. Would they also spend money to be listed in
> the "official" OOo list?
...
> I also don't think it is in OOo's best interest to charge for a listing.
> OO's best interest is to have as many consultants listed that do exist
> and do really make a good job in OOo marketing in their own self
> interest. If they are successful, then OOo is successful and OOo
> can ask them for donations and will have sponsors for their
> conferences.
>
> Last but not least I'm scared by the logistics of the money trail with
> all issues attached.
> Just my five cents to the topic.
The logistics are the real issue, which is why I would prefer wikis
and the honour system. I see no compelling reason for policing lists
like this excessively. Or, we can accept Adam's point and continue
with the website, which allows for more control and checking. My
interest is in reducing management, reducing spurious listings, and
in bringing in small revenue, so as to make OOo more sustainable.
And if this doesn't work, we stop it. As mentioned, we, or at least
I, am not inflexible. Right now, though, the consultants page is not
working at all-- no one goes there, it's a pain to maintain, and we
throw away our promises with our business.
A paid-for page, however, would be placed in a more prominent place
and would ultimately include more things.
I had not really intended in embarking on this discussion at this
point, but why not? For starters, see my presentation at OOoCon:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2006/presentations/tuesday_c7.pdf
Based on the arguments in this thread, I now see following elements:
* motivations/drivers/current problems:
(A) better quality of the consultants [1] pages
(A1) less spurious non-active/non-relevant entries
(A2) more active/"serious" entries
(B) bringing in more revenue stream to OO.o for covering costs [2,3]
(C) reduce administrative overhead of
(C1) maintaining page
(C2) tracking money flow related to consultants entry
These are 3 separate motivations, but maybe some actions can result
in improvements for all drivers.
* proposed actions:
* use "content based" filters to weed out spurious entries
==> + A1 (spurious sites weeded out)
* charge money to be listed
==> + A1 (spurious sites weeded out)
==> - A2 (some "false positives" ... some genuine OO.o support
sites (e.g. the retired/hobby consultant or in certain
countries) will be excluded, while they are genuinly
contribution to local adoption of OO.o)
==> - C2 (*serious* amount of overhead created in money
logistics; if the project currently already has
insufficient
time to follow up one-time, free registrations, how will
it manage the whole money logistics for large amount
(hundreds) of entries that need to be checked and update
yearly ...)
Based on the discussion above and the concept of the support.openoffice.org
site, may I suggest (open for all critique) the following idea (it was already
proposed above by Louis as a separate paying page that would be more
prominently listed).
We could layer the support/consultants entries in 3 layers:
* support.openoffice.org
Current site and content is OK.
Under "commercial" have pointers to:
* Sun as main contributor
(maybe add other major code contributors ?)
* sponsor pages [see below for details]
accompagning tekst on the web site could be:
"These companies pay a yearly fee to help support the OO,o
project. They offer professional support for OO,o"
* consultants page [see below for details]
* sponsors.openoffice.org
Here we list paying sponsors, that do pay money to the project and offer
professional services. It might be better to make this entry a little more
expensive (e.g. 250 or 500 or 1000 EURO/year) and offer more services
for it (link to page, some small 2 line abstract of what the company offers,
more details in geographical coverage (city, state, area, ...), logo
?, ...). If
the price is higher, at least the cost of handling the money is not higher
than the fee itself. I would consider the cost of money handling to be 50 or
100 EURO (i.e. 1 hour of work that could otherwise be charged in real OO.o
consulting to paying customers). So, I would suggest to have the paying
contribution be at least 250 EURO, typically 500 EURO, max 1000 EURO.
I would suggest the period to be at least 12 months, maybe even 24 months
per transaction (a _monthly_ fee seems very inefficient to me). Giving
some more details on geography is actually very useful for the end-user that
has a better chance of picking a nearby professional services company. For
any serious support company in the Oo.o field, I find this kind of money
(250 to 1000 EURO) is realistic.
* consultants page
remains a non-paying entry and is cleaned out by content driven, automated,
technical measures, so as to improve the quality and make the page more
valuable for the non-paying entries.
I do understand this will create a sort of first-class / second-class
entries, but
maybe it is a better solution for the 3 drivers (better quality of commercial
pages, bringing in revenue and reducing administrative overhead) then doing
nothing (status quo) or charging money for every entry in the consultants list.
The creation of the script that cleans out the (non paying) "consultants" page
and the process for collecting money to be listed on the (paying) "sponsors"
page could be separate actions items with a different time line and different
teams executing it.
Open for all discussion.
Peter
[1] http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.html
[2] http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2006/presentations/tuesday_c7.pdf
[3] http://contributing.openoffice.org/donate.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
