Hi, Multiple replies squished together follow. Holger Levsen dijo [Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 03:55:26PM +0100]: > I honestly think it's a big mistake not to go with sponsorship levels, as was > "decided" (*) in the sponsorship team meeting: > > 1. I believe, that we get more money from sponsors, if they have an incentive > to spend more money to reach higher levels. Currently it doesnt really matter > how much money they give. Organizers of other free-software conferences > supported me in this view. In general lines, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. There are a couple of details that make me unsure, of course, but still. > 2. We need to rate non-money sponsors (bandwidth, hardware, etc) anyway, to > sort the sponsors by donation on the webpage. Which we already do. > (...) You are right: We currently rate them. However, there might be some logic behind it. The top sponsors are always ordered according to the importance of their contribution, measured either in monetary or other way. The money that goes into it, yes, is important (determinant, specially at the top) - but there is a lot of subjectivity as well. Comparing a bit with our local sponsors from last year: (and, shoot me if needed, I doubt this information is highly sensitive - I'm leaving some details unmasked anyway) - Universidad Pedagógica Nacional gave us a nice chunk of money. Yes, they deserve to be near the top. - AMESOL lent us their name for any legal reasons that could be needed, and served as contact for some printed media that wrote about Debconf. - Simbiótica, Copyleft, Compugraf, Neocenter, Yaguarete and Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas basically lent us several pieces of assorted hardware (from biggish servers and projectors to Ethernet switches) and bought tons of office supplies - I must add that Tallard... Consumed lots of my time, promised too much, and backed off of _any_ help as soon as I showed them the proceedings and Tshirts had gone off to print. No cookie for them. I'm still angry. If you look at the list of sponsors, they are spread all over it. Sometimes, the ordering was quite arbitrary - but looking at it today, I'd agree it was not _too_ unfairly done. > 4. If we dont have sponsor classes, my (poorly doing) freelancing business is > thinking of sponsoring debconf too, to get on the t-shirt. I think it's > riduculous to get on the t-shirt for any sum. Well, that's a good thing! > Suggested levels: > > label-scheme1 label-scheme2 amount > critical gold-sponsor >50000 euro > serious silver-sponsor >25000 euro > important bronce-sponsor >10000 euro > normal sponsor > 2000 euro > minor supporter < 2000 euro > > I wouldn't put sponsors below 750 euro on the t-shirt. > > (And maybe >30000 _GBP_, >15000GBP, >7500GBP, >2500GBP, >1000GBP are better > boundaries (for dc7). And 500 GBP minimum to get on the t-shirt.) In general lines, I agree. And so far, just looking at the numbers, I think we have got a quite decent combination among those levels. > And I don't think it's too late to come up with levels now. IMHO we can do > this til the end of february without looking silly, maybe even later. Umh... we will look somewhat silly, but then again, we might try to adjust our levels so the boundaries fall just under each of the potential sponsors that have contributed or committed already. /----Marga: > After visiting the other events' pages, I saw that they usually also > distinguish "Media Partners", "Technical Partners" and "Logistic > Parteners" for those who sponsor without giving money. Yes, and at least in DC5 and DC6 we have had quite a number of them. They are usually the hardest to rate, even subjectively. > Also, the levels are usually also implied in the amount of space a > logo takes. For the t-shirts or the Linux Magazine things, I think we > should only do sizes, not titling "Golden" or anything, which might > look weird. No, of course. The labels should be used only internally, at most, between us (committee) and the sponsors. For website/Tshirt/proceedings-back-cover, we could just use a thin line separating the levels, or just an invisible but always respected line. But keep in mind the line must be respected - This year, for design reasons (so the logos would look balanced), we printed shirts and proceedings with the sponsors all mixed up (they are correctly ordered in the webpage). /----Jonathan: > The addition of such sponsorship levels could well scare off smaller > sponsors; people who are prepared to give what they can in support, but > would rather not contribute than be listed in the "second class > sponsorship" region. I don't know how many of this sort of level > contributes to Debconf however, so losing some of the lower end might > not be an issue. Ummhhh... I'm not sure, from DC6 experience. In many cases, I had to explicitly explain to people that, no matter if their contributions were small, they still had the right to appear in the same listing as HP did. Yes, the difference was huge sometimes (I'd even say incalculable), but still, without the local companies that sponsored us either with lent hardware or with sending a group of people to work with us, DC6 would have been even a harder miracle to achieve ;-) So, yes, we might lose some points in the low end of our scale, but we might gain others. We must still include some rule bendability process, but in general this should attract more people than what it scares away. /----Ganneff: > The thing is - levels can scare people away. "Oh, we need to pay that > much to get recognized? No thanks". IMO they dont help much. Ok, then the lowest level starts at "bribe with beer/coffee/ganneff-cookies the orga-team" :) No, really, we must accomodate people that lend us a couple of boxes or stuff like that. > And - its too late for DC7 to start with levels. We already have > sponsors, some already got invoices. It wouldnt be ok to now come up > with some different kind of recognition... Umh... If we are clever _and_ transparent with our current sponsors, it need not be so. /----Maulkin: > Just to clear things up, as I've been asked on IRC, I'm againt it *for > DC7*. > > I'm fully for it for other DebConfs, and was the person who originally > suggested the idea. Umh... Might I ask why an when did you say so? :) -- Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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