A reply to everyone, not Marga, but in this context:
also sprach Margarita Manterola <margamanterola@gmail.com> [2014-11-26 09:50 +0100]:
> This last part was not agreed and is not a decision to be taken by
> the fundraising team. If we are not getting them "for free", I'd
> rather we sponsored more people than spend money earned through
> the hard work of the fundraising team on making the official
> lanyards.
Note that the sponsor would have possibly given us *more* money on
top for the logo placement, which would have allowed us to support
more attendees in addition to the money saved (one travel from the
US, or four people sponsored for the entire week). That sounds
(sounded) like a win-win situation to me. However, during the
meeting it was stated that sponsoring extra people was not
a justification. Wtf?
The first of our primary DebConf goals is to enable face-to-face
interactions, and not "minimise attendee exposure to sponsor logos".
It had been my understanding that the main job of the fundraising
team was to acquire the means to extend this goal to as many people
as possible including those who could themselves never afford to
attend. This is what motivated me so far, and what gave rise to all
my ideas how we could take in more money.
I find it baffling how some people categorically opposed the
sponsored lanyards now without even bothering to find out more, e.g.
the size of the logo. Have you considered that those of us involved
had already made sure that we weren't proposing brightly coloured
Ubuntu lanyards or huge sponsor logos with tiny "DebConf" text
between, by the time we (had to) discuss the idea in public?
Had we just gone ahead, I am fairly certain that noone would have
noticed the logo or we could have contained any complaints fairly
easily. Instead, we flogged down the horse before it was born
because in the past under different circumstances something not
quite alike was tried and caused an uproar in the orga team(s) back
then. We still had lanyards and happy attendees though…
While it's great that we could always make do with
strings-for-lanyards etc., we should also not forget that sponsors
are going to be less likely to give us money in the future if we
give off the impression of an ad-hoc organisation on a shoestring,
or if they find out that even some people in the orga team are
opposed to corporate logos infiltrating our event the way some of us
seem to be.
Apart from that, I would have loved to have had lanyards that are
worth keeping for their functional purpose and as a memory,
especially if they'd been produced for us and for free.
But after the "team decision" (by which I really just mean another
instance of lack of trust in the ability of others to make
judgements), we are now either left without lanyards, or with an
additional task to worry about and an additional position in the
budget.
Maybe those so vocally opposed could now engage actively in
fundraising, dig up the funds, and produce those lanyards?
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org> @martinkrafft
: :' : DebConf orga team
`. `'`
`- DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany: http://debconf15.debconf.org
DebConf16 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
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