Sponsors and fundraising

[Will LaShell <will lashell net>]

Hi guys,

I've written this email 5 times and it still doesn't quite come out
correctly. As such I'm going to send it out and hope that it is not too
disjointed.

I feel like we have been missing out on some opportunities with our
sponsor interactions over the last two years especially considering the
changes in the global economic environment.  We have followed the path
of contacting International partners that are either employers or prior
contributors to GNOME or the GNOME Foundation.  This is not necessarily
a bad plan but I believe we can do better. 

I would like to see us treat our sponsors, both global and local more
like partners instead of just places to go to when we want some money.
We want to reach out to the past sponsors and touch base with them. We
can be asking about their needs and company goals and continuing to show
them how using GNOME and its technologies will help them reach those
goals and provide a positive return on investment. 

The GNOME.Asia Summit & Summit committee could leverage its visibility
and position itself to help bring together those aforementioned
companies with people that can help them. If we can spark even a small
amount of interest we can get small donations for our conferences,
hackfests and user groups. 50 small companies donating $500 to us can
pretty quickly add up to a sizeable amount.  But even more importantly
it gives GNOME's technical assets the opportunity to penetrate areas
that are untouched.

GNOME itself is going through some growing pains trying to realize its
goals in the realm of mobile applications. China has the largest base of
mobile users in the world. Are there ways we can help with this? India
and China also have many companies that develop web applications and
websites. As I work in this industry I feel confident in stating that
for developers a GNOME desktop with GNOME and FSOSS applications is
superior to all other alternatives (with the exception of .net based
projects). I think we can talk to companies about these things
effectively and that we should be proactive in reaching out. 

There could be opportunities within the OpenSolaris realm that we could
find. I don't care to repeat industry gossip regarding Oracle etc, but
perhaps Brian, Emily or Stormy could speak to how we could help in these
areas as well.

There is a lot of passion and creativity within our group. I think that
we can work together to bring the positive attributes of GNOME into
areas that perhaps have been untouched, and reintroduce ourselves to
companies that are still considering how to utilize what we offer.

Sincerely,

Will