On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 09:55:25PM +0100, Arno Töll wrote:
> as somebody who pushed $work to donate money to Debian (i.e. via
> FFIS), I always wondered about the financial merits of these
> donations. As much as I am involved to work within Debian, I have no
> clue what you used "our" money for. I am probably not literally
> interested what for you spent the money we donated, but I think
> sponsors would appreciate or be more interested to donate if they
> could see in a more popular advertisement what Debian spends money for
> (i.e. something more handsome than SPI board minutes) and possibly
> getting little "thank you" post cards or some merchandise (e.g. a
> coffee mug or a T-Shirt) as a symbolic acknowledgement of gratidude.
>
> Actually, $boss asked me the other day how to support Debian better as
> he wasn't very convinced about usefulness of money donations to Debian
> as he didn't get much feedback about that, other than a tax deductable
> receipt.
Something that I've found to work well to "convince" $companies and
$bosses is DebConf sponsoring (which has a more recent incarnation of
the announcement posted by Martin is at
http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120304 ) and
http://wiki.debian.org/Sprints .
The former works well because companies tend to know pretty well the
burden and costs of conference organization.
The latter works well, especially with FOSS-aware companies, because
there is quite some company culture that it is at developer meetings
that donated money "turn into code" (I've stolen the expression from a
Google representative. I don't particularly like it, but it has the
benefit of being effective).
At the risk of repeating myself, this is one of the reason why I've
insisted so much with indexing sprint and insisted so much for facto
sprint reports, at the point of documenting it as a sort of requirement
to ask for reimbursements.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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