Re: Q to all candidates: future of Debian finances
Hi,
On 04/04/25 at 19:48 +0200, Pierre-Elliott Bécue wrote:
> We didn't receive enough sponsorship for the recent Debian events (both
> DebConf23 and 24 made a significant dent in our funds), and we needed to
> buy hardware (the time where some companies gave it to us seems far
> away).
>
> The main issue, sponsors, might be something that can be solved easily,
> if potential sponsors realize that their help is still needed.
I've been wondering for a long time if our fundraising strategy is
optimal.
We are mainly fundraising in the context of DebConf. It is useful when
fundraising to be explicit about a specific goal (organizing a
conference), but it also means that the convincing work needs to be done
every year.
Maybe we should also have a plan to raise funds directly for Debian (not
specifically for DebConf). It might provide a path to convince
organizations to allocate a yearly budget to Debian, and turn an opt-in
scheme (per-DebConf sponsoring) to an opt-out scheme (annual Debian
contribution, that continues by default every year). In large
organizations, it might be easier to do the convincing work once and
then get that sponsorship written in recurring yearly expenses.
Benefits of sponsoring Debian could include "be mentioned as a Debian
sponsor at official Debian events, next to event-specific sponsors".
An important challenge with such a setup would be to build a team
responsible for organizing that fundraising. It looks like, currently,
we push that responsibility to the DebConf team (with the
motivation/hammer that if they don't do well at fundraising, it directly
limits their ability to organize a nice DebConf).
Lucas
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