Attracting sponsors
Hi all. It's not just connected to GNOME, but community events at all. Here, in Mongolia, I organized first Linux Install Fest in 7th of April, and will organize many of them. But everytime I initiate some ideas or community events I end up having problems with funding. For example, at Linux Install Fest having trouble attracting sponsors we did it by ourselves, burned CDs, printed announces, asked friend to offer conference room for free and so on. Doing so we can't go far. Same problem with SysAdmin Summit, but at this time we cannot do it without sponsors. And the questions are how I can attract sponsors and what benefits can I offer them? How can I encourage them to be our sponsor? Please give me some suggestions. Best regards Dulmandakh Sukhbaatar -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Looking for GnomeWeb goals coordinators
Quim Gil wrote: Also, nobody took a goal since I sent the previous email days ago. Well, don't be shy. :) At least tell what could we do to be more effective recruiting contributors. I'm new here, but I'd be willing to help out. I was going to suggest that I can help move the project pages or perhaps some of dgo to their new homes, but I'm not sure I know enough about what should go where, so if anyone has a suggestion for what this newbie can do to help, let me know! -- Cheers, Michael -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Attracting sponsors
Hi Dulmandakh, DULMANDAKH Sukhbaatar wrote: It's not just connected to GNOME, but community events at all. Here, in Mongolia, I organized first Linux Install Fest in 7th of April, and will organize many of them. But everytime I initiate some ideas or community events I end up having problems with funding. Getting sponsors for small community events is hard. It's ironic that it is easier to get $5,000 or $10,000 in sponsorship from a big company than it is to get $1,000. And getting money from small local companies is hard in general. But there are a few tricks that you can try. And the questions are how I can attract sponsors and what benefits can I offer them? How can I encourage them to be our sponsor? Please give me some suggestions. First, you should prepare a pre-conference document which outlines the goals of the conference - who will be there, what kind of presentations you'll have, if you're having a trade show, what types of stands are available, and roughly how many people you're expecting (although I've always been honest about how many people I'm expecting, I'm an optimist. It is not unusual to overestimate attendance for small events by up to 50%, since it's difficult to count attendees anyway). This document (which you really shouldn't spend too long on) will help get you past the first level of person, the secretary who doesn't have any decision making authority but filters incoming requests, or the marketing person who has never heard of free software (I'm generalising a lot here). The document on its own will not get you sponsorship, but not having it will lose you sponsors. Second, if you're having a trade show, set your prices about double what you consider reasonable - if stands are too cheap, people will not consider that there's any interest in them. You can always negociate with someone who wants to take a big stand. To price your stands, try and find out what commercial conferences are charging in your region, and undercut them a little (by 20 - 30%). I'm not a big fan of trade shows in free software conferences though, and they're usually more of a pain to organise than they bring in in money. Third, aim big for sponsors. Don't ask for the few hundred dollars you need, ask for a few thousand. You can say At USD$5,000 this is the cheapest keynote sponsor spot you'll see for this type of conference - you'll get top billing in a conference with lots of influential techies. Aim for the regional or global people who may have heard of you or your project, rather than the local sales office, where they probably haven't. So let's say you decide that RedHat or IBM might be interested, see if you can get the email address of an open source strategist or director of open source operations or something like that - these people will usually be visible on mailing lists and websites, and as keynotes at conferences (look at the OSCon speaker list, for example), and they may have a blog. Ask them directly, in a casual and informal manner. If your request looks too formal, it risks being sent to the trashcan as a mass-mailed spam (even if you spent several hours working on it). Conversation gets attention. The first step is to make a list of possible sponsors, in order of the relevance of your conference to their business, and then ordered by the chances of getting money. For a sysadmin conference, the Unix producers (HP, IBM, Sun, Fujitsu?, Bull?) are likely to be the most relevant, but then filter on their current results - Sun are about to do a layoff, so your chances of getting money off them are likely to be slim to none. Then the hardware producers and resellers (things like printers, UPSes, racks, storage devices). Then the Linux distributions. Then the local government offices (try to get the direct contact for the chief information officer, and the phone works better for government contacts than email). Then the commercial software creators (if you're willing to sell your soul). For each company, try to put a name opposite, and try to measure your chances based on your responses. If you don't get a reply, don't hesitate to resend a polite and short ping a week later, and every week until you get a reply. Hope this advice helps - perhaps it should go in the conference organisation cheat sheet that Paul Cooper is going to work on (isn't that right, Paul? ;-) Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Attracting sponsors
Wow this is quite enlightening (and timely for myself as well). Thanks for the reply. It just gave me a different perspective on staging an event locally. Jerome G. -- Jerome Gotangco [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mobile: +639196555242 Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG: 0x9E379FC6 -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Looking for GnomeWeb goals coordinators
Hi Michael, The two goals you are mentioning will be *perhaps* better coordinated by someone with a CVS account, they are not that friendly to pure newbies. What are your skills/preferences? This is a question for anybody wanting to get a goal assigned. :) Perhaps you want to lead one of these: * Single gateway to all the news sources provided by the GNOME subsites * Single gateway to all the contact, feedback and support sources provided by the GNOME subsites The methodology could be similar to what we have done for http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GnomeSubsites : see what we have got in www.gnome.org, live.gnome.org and elsewhere, create a wiki page with your initial collection and ask people here to check and improve it. Pushing one of these goals would imply to think how and where this information should be put in www.gnome.org El dc 26 de 07 del 2006 a les 09:09 +0100, en/na Michael Maclean va escriure: I'm new here, but I'd be willing to help out. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Probably the biggest Linux deployment
Perhaps you want to write a success story for the new www.gnome.org. If you know about other cool GNOME usage/development/deployment stories we need some, see http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/CaseStudies El dg 23 de 07 del 2006 a les 12:38 +0530, en/na Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay va escriure: On 7/23/06, Rajiv Vyas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: LIC's Linux move could be one of the biggest yet by a single entitity. Since it's Red Hat, there are chances it is GNOME. LIC has been a GNOME desktop area for sometime now. Will try and find out more on this and post to the list -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Experiences with these CMSs
Quim Gil wrote: El dt 25 de 07 del 2006 a les 11:27 +0100, en/na Thomas Wood va escriure: I still don't think we should rule out a good build system that creates static pages. As Greg requests, can the people in favor of keeping the current system make an evaluation of the requirements, as we are doing with the new CMS candidates? http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/CmsRequirements About the current system, I'm specially concerned about: * a comfortable framework for editing content (commits are showstoppers) Agreed - committing to cvs/svn requires a certain amount of technical knowledge. However, it does have the advantage that our translators are already fully equipped to use it. * full text search (we would need a tool for that) I'm sure there are lots of tools we could use for this. This is actually the only area I can see where we need true dynamic content. Also about * shall provide feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) If we have a good enough build system, then it could be rebuilt every hour or so (e.g. like how planet works). and the goals * Own channel for publishing the official news of the GNOME project * Single gateway to all the news sources provided by the GNOME subsites Perhaps we could have all the news related stuff under news.gnome.org, manage them through a CMS fully equipped with feeds features, tags and all the marvel dynamic pages can offer to news related sites (i18n here wouldn't be a problem since news are a one-shot work easy to track, with no further editing/updating) Is this not what gnomedesktop.org is currently doing anyway? I wasn't aware we were including a replacement in our revamp plans. My last but not least concern is the homepage, that shouldn't be static. Au contraire, it should reflect everyday all the activity and life generated in the GNOME project. But static PHP (or something) managed with the current system could provide a vivid homepage operating with the dynamic data spread through the GNOME subsites, isn't it. I agree that the home page shouldn't become stagnent, but having a build system to generate the website doesn't mean it has to. See above about planet and re-building at predefined intervals. Perhaps the core reason why I think the current system is not enough is the possibility of having a 'myGNOME' alike experience being a registered user and getting the information and services tailored to my interests. Olav, Anne, Journalist A, user B, ISD C etc would get different homepages and perhaps also different wgo structure. But well, none of this belongs to the current release goals and they are not even agreed goals at all. I don't want to introduce red herrings, nor I want to stop thinking in the big picture. To be honest, I hate having to log in to access features of a website. What sort of different home pages do you have in mind? I can't think of any useful use case for it at the moment. I hope my obsession for migrating to a good CMS is more understandable now. However, I realize the current system evolved could be a reasonably good choice for the strict wgo if we solve the content edition problem. IMO this is more important than the i18n problem, since there is no point having a good solution for translating if you don't have a good solution for publishing first. Well, I hope I have an obsession for a good CMS too! A proper build system (not like the current one) could provide a good CMS. I just want to make sure we explore all possible avenues. -Thomas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: CEBIT Expo 2006 GNOME Booth
We got members in Istanbul, and currently I'm in Ankara, but it's no problem to ship stuff to Istanbul because Expo is in Istanbul as well. I found the Expo's postcode in Istanbul to use with the UPS calculator. It would cost around 400 Euros for each delivery, so that would be 800 Euros to get it there and back. So, that plus the expected customs/border problems make this a bad idea. I don't think it would be economical or reliable to send a poster either. I think it would be a much better idea to print some posters in Turkey for you to use repeatedly. I feel sure that the GNOME board would like to give you some money to do this. You should ask them on [EMAIL PROTECTED], suggesting what you need and precisely how much it will cost, plus by when you need it. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: cms performance
Gergely Nagy wrote: It just occurred to me, we have to consider CMS performance. Are there numbers how many hits we get on wgo? Perhaps we need some caching requirements for the dynamically served pages? This is yet another reason I don't want people to rule out a build system. guadec.org is horribly slow for me (it feels like I'm back on 56k dial-up sometimes). I don't know whether this has to do with Drupal, or the fact that it is image heavy (or both). -Thomas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Looking for GnomeWeb goals coordinators
quote who=Quim Gil Have a look at the 2.16 goals at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Goals and suggest any change now. Under 2.16 goals, one of the unassigned tasks is move projects subsites out of wgo - I strongly think this should be deferred, because I've yet to see any analysis for what we (and that's a *big* 'we') want to get out of the projects sites, and what the purpose of moving them is. It's underspecified and unassigned, so should be deferred. :-) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia http://lca2007.linux.org.au/ It's a pan-dimensional cake, and there are many ways to slice it. - Bruce Badger -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
news.gnome.org (was Re: the real wgo goals)
Gergely Nagy: Spinning off a news.gnome.org _just_ because it may be served by a different CMS is IMHO not the way to go. It was not like that and I was just prospecting possibilities. A news.gnome.org is in the potential goals (in fact http://news.gnome.org/ already exists and is the same than http://gnomedesktop.org/ ). I was suggesting a possibility to combine with some sense a CVS based wgo with a CMS based news subsite/channel. If we put it in wgo/news or news.g.o is like secondary at this stage of the discussion. CMSs don't make pages vivid. Authors do. In practice it is evident that CMSs help making pages vivid compared to our current system. CVS accounts and command line commits stop many potential contributors from authoring content in wgo. Most people used to publish news stories online are not used to work this way at all, nor they feel attracted to learn what it is considered a routine for developers. Thomas Wood: Is this not what gnomedesktop.org is currently doing anyway? I wasn't aware we were including a replacement in our revamp plans. We are not including any replacement, just stating something already happening. Currently the wgo homepage features a Latest News column with 3 news stories that are not what you currently see in http://gnomedesktop.org + an Upcoming events news-alike column that has no relation with Footnotes either. Should we have a separate news channel? Should those news be simply the latest relevant entries at gnomedesktop.org? Should they be the latest posts to gnome-announce-list? An edited combination of all the sources? No idea, this is a discussion related with a couple of 2.16 goals: * Own channel for publishing the official news of the GNOME project (unassigned, and it would be great if someone from Gnomedesktop or the GNOME Journal pick it up) * Single gateway to all the news sources provided by the GNOME subsites (Michael Maclean) -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: cms performance
Em Ter, 2006-07-25 às 18:47 +0200, Dave Neary escreveu: Hi Gergely, http://XXX.gnome.org/stats works for www, developer, planet and foundation And journal! ;) -- Guilherme de S. Pastore fatalerror -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: the real wgo goals (was Re: Experiences with these CMSs)
El dc 26 de 07 del 2006 a les 13:45 +0200, en/na Gergely Nagy va escriure: * Define the content and scope of www.gnome.org (needs coordinator) [2] IMHO this is the single most important task in the whole process. I didn't add it to the goals because I assumed that it was a task implicit in * Define a clear structure for www.gnome.org - GnomeWeb/NewWgoStructure and also * Make wgo explain clearly what is GNOME, why you want to have it and be part of it However, if it needs to be explicit let's make it explicit. It is now listed at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Goals Until this is sorted out, a CMS should not be decided for. I would pick it myself now but I'm busy until the end of the month. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Looking for GnomeWeb goals coordinators
El dc 26 de 07 del 2006 a les 14:43 -0700, en/na Jeff Waugh va escriure: Under 2.16 goals, one of the unassigned tasks is move projects subsites out of wgo - I strongly think this should be deferred, because I've yet to see any analysis for what we (and that's a *big* 'we') want to get out of the projects sites, and what the purpose of moving them is. I agree the formulation of the goal is not appropriate. I have added a question mark: * move projects subsites out of wgo? It is clear that we are not going to move anything anywhere without previous discussion and consensus. Like we are doing with the rest of tasks. It's underspecified and unassigned, so should be deferred. :-) For the same reason we should defer most of the current goals and we would end up producing almost nothing in this release. :) Goals not getting a plan and the resources needed to accomplish them will be deferred per se, included this one. Let us keep it by now. Anyone wants to take it to start settling it down? -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: cms performance
Kinda. The il8n stuff makes the journal a single language one. One I do not find optimal as the magazines [1] who have re-printed our articles have mostly been Spanish speaking. So I think there is a lot of interest in seeing these articles in other language, which is difficult currently. I'm waiting for you guys to come up wtih a good solution for us to use. :-) sri On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 08:12:47PM -0300, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote: Em Ter, 2006-07-25 às 18:47 +0200, Dave Neary escreveu: Hi Gergely, http://XXX.gnome.org/stats works for www, developer, planet and foundation And journal! ;) -- Guilherme de S. Pastore fatalerror -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
