Re: advisory board fees

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/8/25 Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>:
> How about this? Feedback is welcome
>
> Subject: GNOME Foundation 2010 Donations (income? fees?)
>
> GNOME Advisory Board Members,
>
> 2010 will be a key year for the GNOME Foundation with the release of GNOME
> 3.0. We'd like to make sure we have sufficient income to hold several key
> hackfests and to support a small staff. In order to do this, we need your
> help.
>
> In 2010, we'd like to have:
>
> A small staff that enables the community to be effective. We believe the
> minimum staff to keep everything running most effectively is an executive
> director, part time administrative assistant and a system administrator.
> These staff skills will complement and enable our community of GNOME
> contributors. Having contributors who are excellent hackers, artists and
> documentation writers take time off to do system administration work or
> reimburse travel expenses is not the most effective use of our resources.
> Establish a regular and reliable schedule for hackfests, as these are
> essential for getting past roadblocks and getting new initiatives going,
> such as GNOME 3.0! In 2009 we had plans for many key hackfests and due to
> the economy and the way we had fundraising set up, we were unable to do any
> of the ones we had planned for the first half of the year.
>
> Maintaining a small staff and a regular schedule of key hackfests will
> enable us to:
>
> Recruit and integrate new contributors quickly. GNOME's popularity and the
> size of its community depends on integrated and running web infrastructure.
> There are some efforts underway to make this happen, for example, we are
> updating our web site to more easily enable contributions from more
> people,upgrading bugzilla to improve everyone's working speed and we are
> adding a CRM system. This is a lot to do, which is why we need a regular
> system administrator who can ensure that existing contributors work
> effectively and new contributors come up to speed quickly.
> Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done. GNOME 3.0 was
> started at the usability hackfest at last year's Boston Summit. The GTK
> hackfest made tremendous progress last year and the documentation hackfest
> this year not only improved Mallard but set an example for other free
> software projects. In the following year, we would like to have hackfests
> for GNOME 3.0 usability, user deployment, accessibility, Zeitgeist and
> marketing. We need to make sure the income we can count on can support a few
> key hackfests without additional money.
>
> We have worked on making this plan a reality by raising more money and
> spending the money we have more effectively. For example:
>
> We raised money in new ways, like Friends of GNOME which has raised $20,000
> this year! (This is up 312% from last year when we raised only from $6400
> over the whole year.)
> We've signed up 3 new sponsors. Given the current economy, that was a great
> result. It's reasonable to assume to pick up some more when the economy
> improves.
> We established a travel committee, which greatly improved the GNOME
> Foundation's efficiency in sponsoring travel. By organizing lodging as well
> as approving airfare, the travel committee was able to substantially
> increase the number of people who received travel assistance. For GUADEC
> 2009 they managed travel assistance for 39 people for $31,838. Compare that
> to 36 people for $41,000 in 2008.
>
> While all this has helped us, it has turned out to be insufficient to
> accomplish our basic plans for staffing and hackfests. Thus, we ask you to
> consider to raise your support by accepting a raise in advisory board
> members fees.
>
> Advisory board fees have been steady for 10 years. Inflation, the value of
> the dollar and the economy have all changed during that time. ($10,000 in
> 1999 when the GNOME Foundation first started is only $7,892 in today's
> dollars.)
> You, as companies vested in the interest of GNOME, will profit from these
> plan, too. All the companies in our community will benefit from a better
> system administration structure that enables new members to join quickly as
> well as existing members to function most effectively. You will also benefit
> from usability and accessibility hackfests that affect GNOME 3.0 projects.
> Any marketing effort the GNOME Foundation does for the free desktop will
> help all of the companies that currently use and deploy GNOME technologies.
> Many of you support us throughout the year, but in a year with a weak
> economy it's hard to keep up those donations throughout the year. While we
> hope that you'll continue to support us throughout the year, by having a
> larger annual donation up front, we hope to have more reliability.
>
> In 2010 we'll be asking all large advisory board companies to support the
> GNOME Foundation with $20,000 and smaller companies with $10,000. While we
> realize this is a big increase, we think overall the additional money will
> help our community of 400+ Foundation members to make a much bigger impact
> in the world of free software and the GNOME desktop.
>
> Thanks in advance for supporting our 2010 initiatives.
>
> Best,


I think is just brilliant, good wok Stormy.

-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz