Re: Sponsors and fundraising

[Emily Chen <emilychen522 gmail com>]

Hi Will, 

Thanks for writing this email. I read several time and thinking about your email. 
Sorry it takes me one week to reply to your email.

2010/9/14 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.

Yes, you point out the real problem in the past three years. We only thinking about contact with international companies, but not good at call for local companies sponsorship.

This year, COSCUP did a great job on call for local sponsors in Taiwan.

The gnome.asia team actually tried to contact with local sponsors, but it really depending on the local companies' understanding of how to work with GNOME.

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.

Yes, that's the right way to go.

This is what I am trying to do in China now. There are some Chinese company, for example, CS2C,  which product is deeply depending on GNOME.

I was talking with them about considering join the GNOME foundation, as well as sponsor gnome.asia. After working with them in more than years, currently, they plan to work closely with Beijing GNOME Users Group and GNOME community. They sponsor lots of BGUG events, for example, they sponsor SFD last week.

If GNOME.Asia come to Beijing or China again, I am sure CS2C will sponsor gnome.asia.

So it takes time for the local company to understand the how to work with GNOME community and realized the value of GNOME.Asia.

When we thinking about hosting GNOME.Asia Summit in other country, the local organizer's need to take our past experience and try to work more local companies.

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.

Yes, GNOME mobile is important. I want to point out Samsung. This GUADEC, I talked with people from Samsung, they are interested in GNOME, especially on GNOME.Asia. We should think about work with them to have GNOME.Asia in Korea one year.
 

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.

I think one important goal for each GNOME.Asia is should : help to build and grow GNOME Users Group in Asia. It really works.  Take Beijing and taiwan as an example, the GNOME community is more active now and I can see more opportunities for GNOME in those two places.

Asia is a new place for GNOME. The long term goal for GNOME.Asia is reach to more Asian countries we haven't been there before and collecting the GNOME community in Asia.

Thank you Will for writing this email to us.

-Emily 

Sincerely,

Will

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