Re: Status on sponsorship brochure
Hi,
I would like to elaborate on one of the points below:
On Fri, Aug 08, 2014 at 04:36:47PM +0200, Michael Banck wrote:
> 2. Now that we might have an open weekend, I think we should consider
> allowing gold/platinum sponsors to have a small booth at that weekend to
> present themselves and get into contact with attendees.
To make it clear, I was talking about booths in the "main conference
area", near where the talks are supposed to be, not during a job fair
(which I think we could do in addition).
> At the same time, I think we should make it clear from the beginning
> that we do expect sponsors not to advertise proprietary products or
> otherwise harass participants.
What I had in mind is something similar to the PostgreSQL conferences I
attended in the past: some PostgreSQL-related companies (who were
sponsoring the event) are having booths around the coffee-break area
(near the talk rooms). They wouldn't actively start talking to passing
attendees, but be happy to discuss with people who approach them. Also,
at least half of their booth staff (which seems to be 2-3 people) had
a technical background I'd say. In conclusion, I think no attendee was
ever harassed by one of the booths, which I think would be a very
important worry of DebConf attendees to address.
I am not quite sure whether that is just a sensible, unwritten,
human-interaction rule, or was part of a contract, but we could
certainly do the latter if we are worried.
I think that providing booths to gold/platinum sponsors would allow them
to interact with Debian developers and users who would like to interact
with them, and would be welcome by prospective sponsors (at least this
is my opinion).
Michael
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