Paolo, I did not know of your past efforts mailing letters. Maybe there are lessons there that would allow us to improve the process and be more successful. Or it is really a dead-end. I don't know for sure. But if 1 letter gave way to a single 500€ donation it would be 45% of all funding in the bug squashing initiative page (I'm excluding Faunalia's own donation). So maybe even with a small percentage of success it could be very effective.
As to how to create a list of users, there are a number of alternatives. Of course, we will never have a complete list, and maybe will include a few non-users ;) but it is feasible. Look at conferences, and email lists, and personal contacts, and so on. Ask in the letter itself for other users that might be willing or using that same project/product. You know, use the community. I'm not a marketeer but I think there is something here that could be very positive. Regards, Duarte -----Mensagem original----- De: Paolo Cavallini [mailto:cavall...@faunalia.it] Enviada: segunda-feira, 6 de Junho de 2011 11:12 Para: discuss@lists.osgeo.org Assunto: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Are there proposed ways to raise funds for OSGeo projects? Il 06/06/2011 11:28, Duarte Carreira ha scritto: > I like the page for PostGIS Raster coordinating the roadmap and > funding/dev.time [1]. > > > > Regarding a tool/site, I haven’t seen one that would personally inspire me to > donate, > or help me convince my company to donate. They feel disconnected from the > project > itself, and honestly they give this image of impersonal, bank-ish approach. > Also, the > money raised seems to indicate poor success rates. > > > > I feel that for a project, in my particular case, the easiest way to have a > positive > funding decision in the company I work for would be: > > > > 1) Receive a letter from OSGeo/Project campaign to raise funds, stating > a few > facts of life in FOSS development, and pointing out the benefits of the model > to all > users/community, ending with an emphasis on community efforts where everyone > has its > role (users/companies and developers/project stewards/osgeo). To make things > even > easier to “stakeholders” present a few “common” donation values… (you know, > like a > checkbox list ;) > > 2) Allow for optionally directing donated funds to available roadmap > features or > existing bugs (not sure how this would work out in several scenarios, like > when > minimum funding is never reached…) > > 3) Have a project page where we can see how funding is working, progress > is > made, who is donating, etc. (similar to [1]), but this is a plus, and not > really a > requirement. But it would be nice to be informed of any progress done to the > selected > features/bugs when/if it happened OK, sounds reasonable. One problem is: how do we collect the addresses? We do not want to spam around. Also, please consider that in the past we have sent letters to all companies listed in the support page, and we received very few responses (none of them positive). So, it's a difficult path after all. For now, the only very successful approach has been for more mature institutions to hire directly one developer or a company (this is how much of the work on QGIS is funded anyway). Our bug squashing initiative[0] has met a reasonable success, and IMHO we should build on that. Suggestions welcome. -- Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc [0]http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Bugs
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