Hi all,
You may be familiar with the fact that circa 2010, we ran a successful
fundraising campaign to allow the GNOME Foundation to hire a part-time
sysadmin (see also http://www.vuntz.net/journal/post/2010/06/02/Hiring-
a-sysadmin-for-the-GNOME-infrastructure for a memory refresher).
This has served us well throughout the years: both the reliability and
the scope of services offered on the GNOME infrastructure rose a lot
since then.
As of 2015, this fund has now been depleted. Personally, I find it
rather impressive that we've managed to do so much, for as long as five
years, with the money raised back then (around 45k total if we take
into account the money contributed through Friends of GNOME during that
campaign).
For some time* now, I've had in my mind to prepare some "marketing
collateral" (such as a brochure) to prepare a new campaign, seeing this
as an opportunity to try bringing in a new set of sponsors this time
around, and perhaps raise a bigger amount that would allow us to
accomplish more work on our infrastructure.
A while ago I started a draft/braindump on my end, but before I spam
you with such a wall of text, I would like to know who would be
interested to help with this.
Globally, this project will involve:
Thinking about the amount of money we want to aim for, what we'll
achieve with it. To give you a rough idea, the work done with our part
-time sysadmin (Andrea), over the past two years, costs an average of
1200 USD per month (roughly). In my view we ought to try to raise as
much money as we can for this, and if we do raise significantly more
than last round's 45K, it might mean we can assign additional resources
or that we can keep going for longer.
Figuring out who our target audience and sponsors would be. Besides the
traditional prospects in our circles, I was thinking this can be a nice
opportunity to involve cloud/hosting companies and get them closer to
GNOME that way. We'll need contacts in those organizations for that to
work, though.
Thinking about the perks that sponsors get for various levels (if any?)
of sponsorship
Considering whether a traditional brochure-style print/PDF document is
the way to go, or if it should be some sort of dynamic crowdfunding
-style micro-site, or...
Whether we take the "one big fundraiser every few years" approach, or
if we do some sort of annual/recurrent "subscription" supporter model.
I'm under the impression the monolithic fundraising approach is easier
and better (not sure we want to be hunting for funds all the time for
this particular aspect).
What our timeframe should be. This has been an "ASAP" item for a while
but we need a deadline here. Unfortunately it's quite late as corporate
budgets are being set as we speak (end of year 2015), though there is
the non-negligible opportunity of leveraging year-end donations by
individuals. Thoughts?
Going through the wealth of information in
https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/ and digesting that into a compelling
pitch. Or, alternatively, just taking the existing draft/plan I had
written some time ago and extending (or simplifying!) it.
Designing the documents (or website) that would serve as the medium for
this message.
I think once we start answering a couple of the initial questions above
I should be able to complete my notes/draft and turn that into a wiki
page for review (or we could have a collaborative editing session with
etherpad if you prefer).
We'll need to start pushing for this as soon as possible to ensure the
continuity of our infrastructure work. I do think this a pretty
interesting marketing project, so I thought I'd share the fun here! ;)
Any takers who would like to help make this happen?
*: In fact, I initially touched upon this subject here during the
winter... https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2015-March/ms
g00019.html
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