Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure

[Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <tiago@debian.org>]

Hi Marga and DC15 team!

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 06:44:05PM -0700, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> Hello team,
> 
> Following intense discussions within the DC15 team and the sponsorship team,
> we believe we have finished the DC15 sponsorship brochure.
> 
> In doing so we have removed the points that were questioned and
> incorporated the feedback from the sponsorship team, and also talked
> to a few (potential) sponsors and tried to get a good feeling of the
> attractiveness of our offering.
> 
> You can find the generated PDF here:
>    http://scratch.madduck.net/dc15-sb.pdf
> And the source code at:
>    http://git.debian.org/?p=debconf-data/dc15.git/sponsorship-brochure

Beautiful!

> In the purpose of summarizing the content, these are the sponsor levels:
>   Bronze Level: € 2,000
>   Silver Level: € 5,000
>   Gold Level: € 10,000
>   Platinum Level: € 20,000
> 
> As it was this year, silver level is the minimum to get on the
> T-shirts. And most perks related to levels have stayed the same, with
> the addition of space at the job fair for silver and up, and space for
> a booth during opening weekend for gold and up.

Sounds good to me, except for the "Job Postings and Job Fair" for Bronze
sponsors. It gives enough visibility and it's intrusive enough to
deserve a silver IMO. And please, do not consider having job tables
inside hacklabs.

> The brochure also lists some particular perks that sponsors may choose
> to pay for:
> * Conference Dinner
> * Day Trip
> * Cheese & Wine Party
> * Snacks & Beverages
> * Coffee & Tea

I'm not sure about Day Trip. Could someone point an example of sponsor
name association to this activity? It just sounds a bit weird to me.

My real concern here is about Cheese & Wine Party. IMO it should be kept
as a community-based event. It's something that is a whole-process-fun,
beginning with attendee going shopping around her/his town to find nice
traditional cheese&beverage, then playing with labels&wiki, then
volunteering on tables arrangements etc. I don't like the idea of
capitalizing what's is still a chaotic/unofficial/community/fun activity
in Debconf.

My general comment about these particular sponsored perks is that it
(very personal opinion) only makes sense if a company has a real
relation with the activity. For instance, having a local lab offering
their space for a dinner, or having a local brewery offering beer for
such dinner, then we give back the requested visibility. I mean, not
having a '$BIG_CORP_PIZZA' event just because $BIG_CORP put money on it.
For such things we can use general sponsors money, as it has been done
so far. I know such opinion is somewhat out of the mainstream
marketing/publicity-weird-world, but well, we're used to fight here and
there to not be swallowed by such a reality...

> The current brochure is still a draft, because we want to give people
> on the team one last chance to provide feedback, but given that we are
> heading into the
> budgeting season, we would very much prefer not to wait much longer,
> so please take a look ASAP (within a week). If you are ok with it,
> please say so, so that we don't have to guess what the silence means.
> 

Thanks again for working on this.

Regards,

-- 
tiago