Hey team,
Regarding the "additional sponsorship opportunities" debate and my
recent advancements of the sponsorship brochure, I would like to
clarify where I am coming from:
I am not trying to enforce my views over team consensus. At the end
of the day, I'd much rather pass on some opportunities and chances
if it means that the team supports our path unanimously. However, we
are also still well ahead of the schedule, which should allow us to
get more of both: team consensus and more possibilties.
But we won't have this advantage for long if we don't keep up the
pace. This is the reason I want to keep moving and get things done.
I am happy for people to make changes that create new bases for
discussions (like Michael did with the sponsorship amounts for each
level), but I am not willing to propose something, consolidate all
feedback, propose a modification, and repeat until noone complains
anymore. This would be the approach to use if I had to sell an
article to a newspaper or if I wanted to drive a change with
infinite time at my hands, but it's not an approach that should be
necessary in a team working towards a common goal, with limited time
available.
I never wanted to be working on the sponsorship brochure as you will
remember from our meeting in May, but it's mid-August and it's not
done. Some of you say "whatever, other DebConfs have also taken way
longer and why do we need the brochure now anyway"… but we talked
about this in Heidelberg and the budgeting season is fast
approaching. We have the first requests for the brochure and we are
losing sponsorship income with every week that we wait.
That is the reason I am pushing more than establishing consensus
on every nitty-gritty detail. The brochure is almost done, but there
is still a long way ahead of us, since sponsors-team will want to
see changes, and then there will be a dc-team bikeshedding party.
And yes, I say bikeshedding party because that's already happening
right here: we are discussing — among other things — about whether
a sponsor gets to say a few words at the conference dinner. This is
*standard* at all conferences I know. We used to do that even at
DebConf in the past. It's over before you know it. We are talking
about two minutes, and we are spending *days* discussing it.
I believe that the net income we can generate will be higher when we
offer more individual, unique perks, and I also believe that showing
your face to the crowd will be a motivation for sponsors to give us
more money.
Yes, we should discuss at DC14 what we want to offer and how much we
want to get for each perk. But that does not mean that we cannot
keep moving meanwhile.
So if you disagree, change the text and commit it. Don't expect me
to drive a discussion now which we could have had in the last three
months.
I hope this all makes sense to you.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org> @martinkrafft
: :' : DebConf orga team
`. `'`
`- DebConf14: Portland, OR, USA: http://debconf14.debconf.org
DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany: http://debconf15.debconf.org
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