Re: [Debconf-sponsors-team] Sponsor brochure for DC16 - early thoughts.

[Bernelle Verster <bernellev@gmail.com>]

Thanks Richard.

More general questions, please note that this is for me to establish the way things work etc, I don't have an opinion either way, and I do tend to be hopelessly naive about the well-meaningness of people. I'm also sorry if these have been discussed at length - please direct me to a prior discussion if possible (or task me to write it up somewhere for future reference).

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 6:44 PM, Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Bernelle Verster <bernellev@gmail.com> wrote:


> Has there ever been company specific hack challenges/ BOFs on company specific projects? If so, what was the experience? If not, do you think this could be valuable, and something sponsors would be willing to pay for?

I think not. Generally speaking, you should be careful not to overly
commercialize DebConf; that line would most likely be crossed if
sponsors got any direct influence on the program.

What are the concerns regarding 'commercialising' DebConf, can you explain this more? 

If Debian is used in all these companies that sponsor, then they must have an interest in making it work better. My thinking behind this was that there may be issues that they would like to see improved, but for some reason, bureaucracy or whatnot, haven't gotten to it. These issues may be perfect for a BOF, and would I guess in the past have been proposed by a 'normal' attendee who happens to work for that company. What would the implications be to have the company support this?  

> I'm thinking of including the Debian family tree as an image in the brochure, with a link to the high res version [1]. Do you think this is a good idea? This, in my mind, would serve as an intro to out-of-industry sponsors, and a handy reference point to existing sponsors. I may well be mistaken.

Wow, that's a lot.
You would need to experiment with how it looks when printed, I guess.

Yeah, maybe a more simplified one with a link to the big one. 

> Shall we have particular session sponsors? So one more company logo in addition to Platinum and Gold for each session, which differs from session to session?

The sessions get defined relatively late so that may not be possible;
else it does not sound like a bad idea.

Will think about this more then. Relating to the BOFs, how is sponsoring a session different, less intrusive/commercialising than sponsoring BOFs?

> What does this mean: TODO we should add a statement about ordering within each level so that all sponsors know the rules from the start.

In a tier, sponsors are sorted by monetary contribution, then
precedence. Let's say they committed in the order of A, B, C, D, E and
sponsor the _base_ amount as below, then this is their order:

E - 7700
D - 7500
A - 5000
B - 5000 + 2000 for conf dinner << yes, this is correct
C - 5000

First come first serve, got it. 

> Do we want to do a pick-and-choose sponsor model? ("these options are available", like a shopping cart??) One would work out the pricing such that if the same things get chosen the way they are currently structured, it works out similar to e.g. a platinum package. I've made a rough first stab at it, with an example sponsor choice, for illustration (below), and on a .ods file that I hope to load to git soon.

You would need to make sure that not too much cherry picking happens, imo.

Discussed briefly in next email. 

Richard