Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Neil McGovern dijo [Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 03:42:14PM +]: > On the specific case, I remember when I wound up the accounts for > DebConf 7 that the surplus was earmarked as a donation to DebConf 8. > More specifically, there was a Debian seed fund of 10k USD to help with > the cash flow and then 8k GBP which was transferred to Argentina. > This then continued with 18k USD being sent to Spain, 53k EUR to New > York, and then 19k USD to Bosnia and Herzegovina. > > However, although I think that it's Debian's money, not DebConf's money, > we need to remember what the sponsorship was donated for. We should also > be clear about what may be expected to be a structural deficit, and what > is a cash-flow problem. > > In general, I think that excess should be returned to Debian as the > holding organisation, but that Debian should be willing to help ensure > that sub-projects can draw on Debianfunds if needed, and it is sensible > to do so. On this specific issue: Up until DebConf10, DebConf was *not* officially part of Debian; in DC10 we held a BoF where it was decided DebConf would become what it is now, one of Debian's projects, having our assets managed by Debian (and the trusted organizations), and the national organizations (that are needed for obvious reasons) are approved every year if needed. That's the main reason why we never had any official Debian delegation until 2010, and why we have one since 2011. The DebConf organization team didn't use Debian funds before then, but now the chairs are authorized to use Debian funds to pursue the annual Debian conference. Of course, the overall budget is sent to the DPL for approval. And, yes, this might not be the best ever possible scheme of work - It is just the current one :) signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi Gunnar, On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 12:55:35PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > So, back to the case: What's your take on this issue? How much can one > part of the Debian universe of subprojects expect the money it > generated be available for its future? Should we set a clear number? > On the specific case, I remember when I wound up the accounts for DebConf 7 that the surplus was earmarked as a donation to DebConf 8. More specifically, there was a Debian seed fund of 10k USD to help with the cash flow and then 8k GBP which was transferred to Argentina. This then continued with 18k USD being sent to Spain, 53k EUR to New York, and then 19k USD to Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, although I think that it's Debian's money, not DebConf's money, we need to remember what the sponsorship was donated for. We should also be clear about what may be expected to be a structural deficit, and what is a cash-flow problem. In general, I think that excess should be returned to Debian as the holding organisation, but that Debian should be willing to help ensure that sub-projects can draw on Debianfunds if needed, and it is sensible to do so. Neil -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi Ana! On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:21:20AM +0100, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: > DebConf is one of the biggest expenses of Debian, every year we look > for sponsorship and we had (and have) sponsors who were sponsoring > DebConf as a way of giving their "annual donation" to Debian and > not necessarily funding DebConf itself. > (Do you agree with this part, BTW?) Yes and no :) Having written (if my memory serves me correctly!) the first sponsorship brochure for DebConf 7 I view it as slightly more subtle than that. If DebConf didn't happen, then I don't believe that would mean that there would be an equivalent annual donation that would come in. The funding that's given is committed for a reason - sponsorship of an event raises the profile of the company for the attendees, enable recruitment and offer opportunities for contact building, as well as being "give back to the community". I don't think that a general "give money to Debian" request has quite the same draw. There's a reason it's much easier to raise money for a specific goal/thing than in general :) > In recent years, we have started to invest more Debian money in stuaff > such like sprints and minidebconfs¹ that sometimes look for external > founding. This has lead to some cases where sponsors have been > contacted for separate teams in Debian which can be confusing. > If you think this is a problem. How do you think we can improve this? > I do view this as a problem, and the short answer is that I support Brian Gupta's efforts in the debian-sponsors-discuss list[0]. It's something we should be encouraging, and would potentially draw people into Debian who have not previously felt able to contribute. A great article on fund-raising of a talk from Josh Berkus is at [1]. [0] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-sponsors-discuss/Week-of-Mon-20140310/79.html [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/560381/ > * Publicizing Debian > > We have several officials ways of publicizing stuff in Debian: > press releases, identi.ca, bits.d.o and the DPN. We also have the bits > from the DPL that sometimes overlap with the above sources and announce > stuff that should be announce somewhere else instead of mixed with the > DPL activity. > > That said, the coordination between the above sources doesn't work very > well, all of them have a lot of room for improvement (and I say that > being closely involved in one of them) and I have seen Debian contributors > lost about what to do when they want to announce something, sometimes > being played as a ping pong ball between teams. > I would love to know your vision about how publicizing Debian should work > and if you think you can do something as DPL to improve the current > situation. > Indeed, with my press officer hat on, I'd say that publicity and press is just about scraping by. This isn't to denigrate the fantastic work being done in this area by people, but that I think everyone's overworked, and could do with more help. When Lucas looked at the press delegation, a few of the active publicity people were approached to suggest they may want to become press officers, but unfortunately weren't able to commit the time to do so. Ideally, I'd love to see someone with the enthusiasm and time to take this on, to coordinate our efforts and bring together the different methods of communication we do. As for how to solve this issue, I'll be honest: I don't know. I think that coordination of publicity should go through the debian-publicity mailing list if at all possible, but the core issue is finding someone to take the role and drive it forward. Neil -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 21:56 +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > Why not ask the FreeBSD folks whether they'd be willing to share their code? > > (Yes, I do know that a working donation system requires more than a web site.) I think we would want a system to export from ledger and import to contributors.debian.org which the FreeBSD folks probably don't use. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi, Lucas Nussbaum: > Sure, but there would be quite a lot of work to do to grow it to > something such as https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors, to > which I pointed to previously. > Why not ask the FreeBSD folks whether they'd be willing to share their code? (Yes, I do know that a working donation system requires more than a web site.) -- -- Matthias Urlichs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140322205631.gf3...@smurf.noris.de
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On 22/03/14 at 14:04 +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:15 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > > > 1) we should have a "partners" program that would allow us to track our > > recurring sponsors, and ask them to do their yearly donation to > > *Debian* (not DebConf). > > We already do have a partners program, some of the usual DebConf > sponsors don't appear to be listed there though. > > https://www.debian.org/partners/ Sure, but there would be quite a lot of work to do to grow it to something such as https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors, to which I pointed to previously. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140322070652.ga25...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:15 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > 1) we should have a "partners" program that would allow us to track our > recurring sponsors, and ask them to do their yearly donation to > *Debian* (not DebConf). We already do have a partners program, some of the usual DebConf sponsors don't appear to be listed there though. https://www.debian.org/partners/ -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/caktje6gmnsinswi0ojfozftxdhty4s3a2hy_fbi766yj3bh...@mail.gmail.com
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
[ adding a Cc: to debconf-team ] Lucas Nussbaum dijo [Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 04:15:02PM +0100]: > I think I already answered this at least partially in > https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/03/msg00192.html, so I will > give some more details, specifically for the DebConf case. > > Ideally, I think that: > 1) we should have a "partners" program that would allow us to track our > recurring sponsors, and ask them to do their yearly donation to > *Debian* (not DebConf). > 2) the funding for events such as DebConf or Mini-DebConfs would come > from a mix of Debian funding (thus, indirectly, from the recurring > partners), and from local sponsors. > 3) we would have a better understanding of the yearly annual Debian > budget (including DebConf's), which would make all money-related > decisions easier. Right. I agree with your vision, and I think that most of the conf organizers also will (but cannot speak for them). Just to convert this to what *we* need to do, I think we should shift from requesting sponsors to fund DebConf, we should be requesting to fund Debian, with specific focus on DebConf, right? That would better match reality. It would also, probably, allow/require us to alter our sponsorship benefits: As the sponsors are giving money for the *project* and not just the *conference*, we could have a "thank you" page in Debian, probably linked from https://www.debian.org/donations or something like that, and the sponsors (of a certain level?) can be offered to appear there. Similarly, there could be some synergy leading to the (now not really notorious) donors to Debian-per-se to be credited somehow in DebConf, even if their donations are not "earmarked" to it. Of course, DC14 sponsor acquisition campaign has started, and we cannot change the rules of the game for this time, but it could be evaluated for DC15. > That's where I hope we will be in one or two years, which doesn't really > help with DC14. > > For DC14, it seems that the DebConf team has more problems finding > sponsors than expected (especially the smaller, often local sponsors -- > for DC13, 60% of the funding came from 30 organizations given 6kCHF or > less). I think we are quite far from a panic state. You'd have to compare the funding status now and at this time of the previous year for DCn for every 0 ≤ n ≤ 13 ;-) > A successful DebConf is very important to Debian, and a successful > DebConf requires enough funding to gather many Debian contributors (many > of them, with sponsored accomodation and travel). Given the importance > of DebConf for Debian, I've told Steve that I would be willing to > extend Debian's funding of DebConf beyond what was originally planned. > However, if that ends up being required, I would expect the DebConf team > to seek as many cost reductions as possible, to limit the impact on > Debian's future ability to fund other things, such as infrastructure. Of course, and I thank you for publicly stating this. I know I have a mail pending with the proposed budget to be presented for your approval, I'll do my best to review it today! signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi Gunnar, On 20/03/14 at 12:55 -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > Ana Guerrero Lopez dijo [Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:21:20AM +0100]: > > * Fundraising > > > > DebConf is one of the biggest expenses of Debian, every year we look > > for sponsorship and we had (and have) sponsors who were sponsoring > > DebConf as a way of giving their "annual donation" to Debian and > > not necessarily funding DebConf itself. > > (Do you agree with this part, BTW?) > > In recent years, we have started to invest more Debian money in stuaff > > such like sprints and minidebconfs¹ that sometimes look for external > > founding. This has lead to some cases where sponsors have been > > contacted for separate teams in Debian which can be confusing. > > If you think this is a problem. How do you think we can improve this? > > > > ¹ Both investments are a great idea BTW > > Hi Ana, and thanks for bringing this up. I want to add a point to your > question by moving a request/discussion I should be commenting on in > the DebConf world, but is completely relevant to what you say. So, DPL > candidates, please also comment on this! > > A fundamental part of DebConf organization (and a part I'm basically > unfamiliar with, as I've always shied away from those aspects) is > sponsor acquisition. And, of course, DebConf cannot (and is not > expected) to reach a perfect balance — some years we end up with a > surplus, and sometimes we have to ask Debian for money. Fortunately > (and thanks to the great, hard work of the people doing sponsor > scouting), the overall balance is quite equilibrated. > > As you can see on the DebConf13 final report¹, last year was a great > success in this regard: Not only we stayed quite under the estimated > budget, but we raised one of the largest sponsorship amounts in our > history. > > But, as Ana says in this mail, many sponsors view this money they are > giving as their "annual donation" to Debian. Not all of Debian's > expenses are as publicized as DebConf is, and it might be hard to get > the money just for our regular running costs and upgrade plans, or for > smaller conferences/sprints, or whatever. > > Now, DebConf has followed the policy of not counting of a given year's > surplus as income for our next edition. All of the surplus of > DebConf13 becomes, just as DC13 is finalized, regular Debian money. > > Now... Being five months before DC14, we still have a long time to get > more sponsors. But we are also at the point in time that most likely > seems dismal. We are in no way at a "failure" point, but the DC14 team > asked Lucas (and us chairs) for Debian to make a funding commitment of > up to the DC13 surplus. > > So... I want to make this specific case more into the generic case, > not specifically discussing DC14. I know (from historical trends) that > we are at a point where tension is building, and close to DebConf > things will automagically start working. I don't know how, but it > tends to work that way ;-) > > So, back to the case: What's your take on this issue? How much can one > part of the Debian universe of subprojects expect the money it > generated be available for its future? Should we set a clear number? I think I already answered this at least partially in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/03/msg00192.html, so I will give some more details, specifically for the DebConf case. Ideally, I think that: 1) we should have a "partners" program that would allow us to track our recurring sponsors, and ask them to do their yearly donation to *Debian* (not DebConf). 2) the funding for events such as DebConf or Mini-DebConfs would come from a mix of Debian funding (thus, indirectly, from the recurring partners), and from local sponsors. 3) we would have a better understanding of the yearly annual Debian budget (including DebConf's), which would make all money-related decisions easier. That's where I hope we will be in one or two years, which doesn't really help with DC14. For DC14, it seems that the DebConf team has more problems finding sponsors than expected (especially the smaller, often local sponsors -- for DC13, 60% of the funding came from 30 organizations given 6kCHF or less). A successful DebConf is very important to Debian, and a successful DebConf requires enough funding to gather many Debian contributors (many of them, with sponsored accomodation and travel). Given the importance of DebConf for Debian, I've told Steve that I would be willing to extend Debian's funding of DebConf beyond what was originally planned. However, if that ends up being required, I would expect the DebConf team to seek as many cost reductions as possible, to limit the impact on Debian's future ability to fund other things, such as infrastructure. Lucas signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Ana Guerrero Lopez dijo [Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:21:20AM +0100]: > * Fundraising > > DebConf is one of the biggest expenses of Debian, every year we look > for sponsorship and we had (and have) sponsors who were sponsoring > DebConf as a way of giving their "annual donation" to Debian and > not necessarily funding DebConf itself. > (Do you agree with this part, BTW?) > In recent years, we have started to invest more Debian money in stuaff > such like sprints and minidebconfs¹ that sometimes look for external > founding. This has lead to some cases where sponsors have been > contacted for separate teams in Debian which can be confusing. > If you think this is a problem. How do you think we can improve this? > > ¹ Both investments are a great idea BTW Hi Ana, and thanks for bringing this up. I want to add a point to your question by moving a request/discussion I should be commenting on in the DebConf world, but is completely relevant to what you say. So, DPL candidates, please also comment on this! A fundamental part of DebConf organization (and a part I'm basically unfamiliar with, as I've always shied away from those aspects) is sponsor acquisition. And, of course, DebConf cannot (and is not expected) to reach a perfect balance — some years we end up with a surplus, and sometimes we have to ask Debian for money. Fortunately (and thanks to the great, hard work of the people doing sponsor scouting), the overall balance is quite equilibrated. As you can see on the DebConf13 final report¹, last year was a great success in this regard: Not only we stayed quite under the estimated budget, but we raised one of the largest sponsorship amounts in our history. But, as Ana says in this mail, many sponsors view this money they are giving as their "annual donation" to Debian. Not all of Debian's expenses are as publicized as DebConf is, and it might be hard to get the money just for our regular running costs and upgrade plans, or for smaller conferences/sprints, or whatever. Now, DebConf has followed the policy of not counting of a given year's surplus as income for our next edition. All of the surplus of DebConf13 becomes, just as DC13 is finalized, regular Debian money. Now... Being five months before DC14, we still have a long time to get more sponsors. But we are also at the point in time that most likely seems dismal. We are in no way at a "failure" point, but the DC14 team asked Lucas (and us chairs) for Debian to make a funding commitment of up to the DC13 surplus. So... I want to make this specific case more into the generic case, not specifically discussing DC14. I know (from historical trends) that we are at a point where tension is building, and close to DebConf things will automagically start working. I don't know how, but it tends to work that way ;-) So, back to the case: What's your take on this issue? How much can one part of the Debian universe of subprojects expect the money it generated be available for its future? Should we set a clear number? [ Full disclosure: I'm pushing this subject here with authorization from Steve Langasek, who brought up the topic in a private DPL-Auditors-Chairs mail. Lucas answered right away; we the Chairs have not yet answered a peep on the topic, but making the issue (without some details as specific money or specific questions) more visible might be a good idea. Besides, I feel this to be on-topic for the discussion at hand. ] ¹ http://media.debconf.org/dc13/report/DebConf13-final-report.en.pdf signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 09:53:21PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Wed, 19 Mar 2014, Francesca Ciceri wrote: > > Lack of coordination among the different sources: that's a first > > problem, indeed. Debian-publicity (the ML) should act as a node for > > all the publicity/promoting people in Debian, but it doesn't. > > How so? I have the feeling that all the relevant people are on the list? For one thing, debian-publicity is a public list and we know is followed by journalists. By design, I don't see how it could possibly be used to coordinate / dispatch announcements over different media, some of which (e.g. press releases) often have temporarily embargo rules. It seems to me it just cannot possibly work for that role. OTOH it is great to ask feedback about *public* drafts. On the more general points Francesca and you have made I agree though. The different communication sub-teams have grown over time somewhat non organically, due to the different availability of the involved people and their (lack of) interest in working on specific media. This is now striking back. A more central(ized) coordination role seems to be needed now. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On Wed, 2014-03-19 at 21:53 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > How so? I have the feeling that all the relevant people are on the list? I get the feeling that Martin and Kai from the Press Team aren't subscribed, unsure though. > Maybe there's too much things going out of band without feedback to > debian-publicity but I have the feeling that mailing debian-publicity > with news to relay seems to work okayish right now. Most of the identi.ca/debian posts are done on the IRC channel only as specified by our current workflows. > Yes, it would be better if everybody who contributed news ideas got some > feedback. Most of the time feedback isn't needed and the relevant folks just write the paragraph for DPN and include it. > I blame identi.ca upstream for this... that switch was really a huge step > backwards in terms of features. It might be better in the long term but > we can't really be blamed when there was simply no good tool for the task. I think slightly differently. I think it was a mistake on Debian's behalf to rely on a SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute, free or non-free) not controlled by Debian for primary storage and distribution of short news snippets. I think we should learn from this and go towards something like what I proposed on -publicity in response to Laronja's post but also extended to all external sites (not just social networks), including things like Slashdot, Hacker News and so on. In implementing this idea I think we also solve Francesca's concerns because everything goes to the one place (www.d.o) so we have to co-ordinate to get everything in place. Every external medium has different requirements and conventions but I think it would be possible to achieve if someone has the time to work on it. First step would be to analyse existing information flows between Debian and external sites. https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2013/10/msg8.html > It's not really difficult to find volunteers to package new software. But > it requires a post to debian-mentors or on planet Debian at least. The > publicity > team could even put this task in the Debian france event running now: > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFrance/NewContributorGame > > Paul, are you willing to mentor a project related to this? I have a number of publicity related ideas but I hesitated in adding them to GSoC/OPW/DFNCG because I'm procrastinating on too many tasks already and thus I don't think I could dedicate the required time. > At least for DPN, it survived quite well even though you went away and even > though > David Prévot reduced his involvement as well. I get the impression Cedric is doing most of the writing for DPN but there are definitely other contributors to it. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hello Francesca, On Wed, 19 Mar 2014, Francesca Ciceri wrote: > Lack of coordination among the different sources: that's a first > problem, indeed. > Debian-publicity (the ML) should act as a node for all the publicity/promoting > people in Debian, but it doesn't. How so? I have the feeling that all the relevant people are on the list? Maybe there's too much things going out of band without feedback to debian-publicity but I have the feeling that mailing debian-publicity with news to relay seems to work okayish right now. > This means that sometimes a piece of news is published twice on two > different media (and I agree this is not all bad) > and sometimes it's ignored by all of them (and, yes, as you may guess *this* > is > extremely bad). Yes, it would be better if everybody who contributed news ideas got some feedback. > I'd like to add also that the existence of different media is not > about redundancy, but about choosing the most appropriate medium for > each kind of news (which should be the responsibility of an editorial > team, and not done on a whim). > You cannot publish an entire interview on DPN, nor announce a big > donation via identi.ca, nor link a blogpost on a press release. This is not really a problem currently, is it? > Do you know that since the transition status.net → pump.io, the > automatic publishing of rss feeds for news and planet on identi.ca is > broken? I blame identi.ca upstream for this... that switch was really a huge step backwards in terms of features. It might be better in the long term but we can't really be blamed when there was simply no good tool for the task. > Laura Arjona did a fantastic analysis of the situation [1] many months > ago and asked for help on fixing it: she is not a coder, and she cannot > package > Spigot [2], which would solve our issue. It's not really difficult to find volunteers to package new software. But it requires a post to debian-mentors or on planet Debian at least. The publicity team could even put this task in the Debian france event running now: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFrance/NewContributorGame Paul, are you willing to mentor a project related to this? If you don't have packagers on debian-publicity, someone needs to reach out where packagers are... and here we come back to your point about lack of vision/leadership within the team. It also reminds me of your conversation with Enrico: http://www.enricozini.org/2014/debian/on-responsibilities/ The publicity team badly needs a project manager. Due to the delegated nature of press officers, almost everybody expect the press officers to act like coordinators/managers but that's just not (or no longer) the case... > sources (press, identi.ca, dpn, bits) are all basically a one (wo)man team: > sooner of later if all the weight is on the same shoulder, the person > behind it will burn out. > For teams like DPN and bits, especially, we don't have a fallback. At least for DPN, it survided quite well even though you went away and even though David Prévot reduced his involvment as well. So everything is not as black as you're depicting the situation :) but I agree that we could do much better. > Lack of vision. > That's the one to top all of this. > There is no plan. > There has not been - at least in the last 4 years - any kind of > collective debate on what to do about publicity in Debian, what kind of > style and editorial choices do, how to organize the work and make it > more efficient. Or who we want to reach, really, with our news. That's the kind of discussion that a project manager ought to animate... and then build a plan ouf of the result. > I dearly love publicity in Debian: it is where I started to contribute, > I hold in high esteem many of the people working there, and I have many > idea and enthusiasm for it. > But I learnt my lesson and I'm not willing to fix any of these problems > if there aren't at least 3-5 people willing to working on them as well. > Because otherwise it wouldn't be sustainable on long term. In my experience, it works in the opposite direction, you have to put some initial work in order to attract supplementary contributors. And in this case, it seems to me that you could leverage the fact that we're a community of techies that love to build tools... because IMO if you want to attract (enough) non-technical contributors we should strive to use some web application to manage the workflow from news collection to news publication (this doesn't preclude having an underlying VCS for the people who prefer to use vim in a git repository). So the plan would be: 1/ discuss the ideal workflow 2/ write some description of a web application that implements this workflow 3/ find someone to create this application (either a volunteer up-front, or a mentor for a GSOC student, etc.) In any case, welcome back in the publicity team! :-) Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Discover the Debian Administrator's Handbook: → ht
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 05:59:43PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > Hi Ana! > > On 19/03/14 at 10:21 +0100, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: > > * Publicizing Debian > > > > We have several officials ways of publicizing stuff in Debian: > > press releases, identi.ca, bits.d.o and the DPN. We also have the bits > > from the DPL that sometimes overlap with the above sources and announce > > stuff that should be announce somewhere else instead of mixed with the > > DPL activity. > > > > That said, the coordination between the above sources doesn't work very > > well, all of them have a lot of room for improvement (and I say that > > being closely involved in one of them) and I have seen Debian contributors > > lost about what to do when they want to announce something, sometimes > > being played as a ping pong ball between teams. > > I would love to know your vision about how publicizing Debian should work > > and if you think you can do something as DPL to improve the current > > situation. > > The big question here is: does it hurt? Yes, it does. As a former press officer, editor of DPN and bits.d.o, I've had the privilege to work on all of the above publicity "sources". I've left for a (little?) hiatus some months ago, so maybe the situation is changed now and if so I hope the people from those teams will correct me. > I think that it's better to have > something published twice, rather than not published at all. Of course, > it would be better if we used all our official ways of publicizing stuff > in a perfectly coherent and organized way, Lack of coordination among the different sources: that's a first problem, indeed. Debian-publicity (the ML) should act as a node for all the publicity/promoting people in Debian, but it doesn't. This means that sometimes a piece of news is published twice on two different media (and I agree this is not all bad) and sometimes it's ignored by all of them (and, yes, as you may guess *this* is extremely bad). I'd like to add also that the existence of different media is not about redundancy, but about choosing the most appropriate medium for each kind of news (which should be the responsibility of an editorial team, and not done on a whim). You cannot publish an entire interview on DPN, nor announce a big donation via identi.ca, nor link a blogpost on a press release. > but I'm not sure that the > current situation is so bad at the moment: our official communication > mediums work pretty well, and are quite complementary. No. I'm sorry to be a bit harsh, but it doesn't work well. In some cases, doesn't work at all. Do you know that since the transition status.net → pump.io, the automatic publishing of rss feeds for news and planet on identi.ca is broken? Laura Arjona did a fantastic analysis of the situation [1] many months ago and asked for help on fixing it: she is not a coder, and she cannot package Spigot [2], which would solve our issue. And that's only an example. Try confronting the number of press releases per year before 2012 (included) and those in the last two years. Last hear, we didn't have even an announcement for the election of the DPL. I'm saying this not to be overly critic with the relevant teams/groups: they are doing a fantastic job in extremely difficult situation. What I find extremely worrying is that these sources (press, identi.ca, dpn, bits) are all basically a one (wo)man team: sooner of later if all the weight is on the same shoulder, the person behind it will burn out. For teams like DPN and bits, especially, we don't have a fallback. Press is another problematic one, where people are or busy with many other responsibilities, or simply MIA. It doesn't help that such teams receive very little feedback or appreciation, but I guess that's not a publicity-only problem. We've tried to recruit new blood, so to speak: but Debian as a whole is still very bad at recruiting people with non-coding/packaging skills and publicity is one of the team suffering for this. (Even though I think that the Debian Desktop team got it worse). > So I'm not sure > that more organization here is worth the effort. Do you have specific > issues in mind that you think should be solved? > Lack of vision. That's the one to top all of this. There is no plan. There has not been - at least in the last 4 years - any kind of collective debate on what to do about publicity in Debian, what kind of style and editorial choices do, how to organize the work and make it more efficient. Or who we want to reach, really, with our news. (And many other things, but this could easily become a rant, so I'll stop now ;)). I dearly love publicity in Debian: it is where I started to contribute, I hold in high esteem many of the people working there, and I have many idea and enthusiasm for it. But I learnt my lesson and I'm not willing to fix any of these problems if there aren't at least 3-5 people willing to working on them as well. Because otherwise it wouldn't be sustainable on long
Re: two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi Ana! On 19/03/14 at 10:21 +0100, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: > Hi, > > Two unrelated questions. Feel free to reply in separate emails. > > * Fundraising > > DebConf is one of the biggest expenses of Debian, every year we look > for sponsorship and we had (and have) sponsors who were sponsoring > DebConf as a way of giving their "annual donation" to Debian and > not necessarily funding DebConf itself. > (Do you agree with this part, BTW?) > In recent years, we have started to invest more Debian money in stuaff > such like sprints and minidebconfs¹ that sometimes look for external > founding. This has lead to some cases where sponsors have been > contacted for separate teams in Debian which can be confusing. > If you think this is a problem. How do you think we can improve this? > > ¹ Both investments are a great idea BTW I agree that we should improve our fundraising/donations infrastructure. It's actually part of the overall goal of improving Debian's financial status, so that all money-related decisions are easier to make -- that's something that I plan to work on if re-elected, as mentioned in my platform (section 3.3.1). There's a number of things to do to improve the way we manage our funds, deal with reimbursements requests, etc. But for fundraising specifically, I think that: - We should have a more organized infrastructure for tracking and advertising Debian's recurring sponsors. https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors is a great example (thanks to Luca Filipozzi for the pointer). - More of our activities (including DebConf, and maybe some MiniConfs) should be funded by Debian directly, instead of through target-specific fundraising. The trick here is that target-specific fundraising is also useful to attract sponsorship from local organizations -- we probably need a way to combine Debian's recurring sponsors and local sponsors where needed. - The value of non-monetary donations (hardware, hosting, services such as SSL certificates) should be assessed and included in the overall scheme. There's a lot of work to do; and as I said above, I think that it's important for the next DPL to work on that, together with auditors and other interested teams/people (using the debian-sponsors-discuss@ mailing list). > * Publicizing Debian > > We have several officials ways of publicizing stuff in Debian: > press releases, identi.ca, bits.d.o and the DPN. We also have the bits > from the DPL that sometimes overlap with the above sources and announce > stuff that should be announce somewhere else instead of mixed with the > DPL activity. > > That said, the coordination between the above sources doesn't work very > well, all of them have a lot of room for improvement (and I say that > being closely involved in one of them) and I have seen Debian contributors > lost about what to do when they want to announce something, sometimes > being played as a ping pong ball between teams. > I would love to know your vision about how publicizing Debian should work > and if you think you can do something as DPL to improve the current > situation. The big question here is: does it hurt? I think that it's better to have something published twice, rather than not published at all. Of course, it would be better if we used all our official ways of publicizing stuff in a perfectly coherent and organized way, but I'm not sure that the current situation is so bad at the moment: our official communication mediums work pretty well, and are quite complementary. So I'm not sure that more organization here is worth the effort. Do you have specific issues in mind that you think should be solved? Lucas signature.asc Description: Digital signature
two questions: fund raising money and publicity
Hi, Two unrelated questions. Feel free to reply in separate emails. * Fundraising DebConf is one of the biggest expenses of Debian, every year we look for sponsorship and we had (and have) sponsors who were sponsoring DebConf as a way of giving their "annual donation" to Debian and not necessarily funding DebConf itself. (Do you agree with this part, BTW?) In recent years, we have started to invest more Debian money in stuaff such like sprints and minidebconfs¹ that sometimes look for external founding. This has lead to some cases where sponsors have been contacted for separate teams in Debian which can be confusing. If you think this is a problem. How do you think we can improve this? ¹ Both investments are a great idea BTW * Publicizing Debian We have several officials ways of publicizing stuff in Debian: press releases, identi.ca, bits.d.o and the DPN. We also have the bits from the DPL that sometimes overlap with the above sources and announce stuff that should be announce somewhere else instead of mixed with the DPL activity. That said, the coordination between the above sources doesn't work very well, all of them have a lot of room for improvement (and I say that being closely involved in one of them) and I have seen Debian contributors lost about what to do when they want to announce something, sometimes being played as a ping pong ball between teams. I would love to know your vision about how publicizing Debian should work and if you think you can do something as DPL to improve the current situation. Best regards, Ana -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140319092120.ga1...@pryan.ekaia.org
