Hi, On Freitag, 15. April 2011, Steve Langasek wrote: > I have never understood this impulse on the part of (a subset of?) the > DebConf organization to spend any money at all on trinkets. It doesn't > matter if the "budget looks good" - it's still a waste of money to spend it > on schwag. We have more money than we need? Great! Save it for later > when Debian can use it to spend on something useful! > > We're not an industry conference run by a company that needs to buy the > attendees' love with free stuff or try to get free advertising from the > attendees when they take home the company's name plastered on their pens > and keychains. I'm quite sure I speak for the whole community when I say > attendees already love Debian, the DebConf team and our sponsors for > making it possible for us to attend an event like this at such a low cost > (free, for many people!) and don't need schwag to seal the deal. > > Now if a sponsor says they want something like this with *their* name on it > as a condition of their sponsorship, sure, by all means, let's spend some > of their money on miscellaneous Stuff if it means there will also be more > money to spend on the things that make a difference for Debian. But > spending more money to print *Debian's* name on give-aways, unprompted? > No way. > > To be fair, some of the schwag has actually been pretty nice. [...] > > Yes, making the sponsors happy is a reasonable use of money. Sending > attendees home with bags of miscellaneous stuff is not. I fully agree with the above. With the exception?/addition, that I think DebConf t-shirts OTOH are very useful, for (their bits in) "creating+improving" our community, communicating/announcing it in public as well thanking/acknowledging the sponsors... But IMO this should be it, even though I acknowledge that (quite?) some people not value tshirts *that* much. But even those who dont wear tshirts themselves, see them all the time :) cheers, Holger
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