Re: GNOME.conf.au and sponsorship

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 20:11 -0400, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> The miniconfs are not funded (aside from basic venue, signage and so on) and
> are not allowed to source sponsorship independently from the main conference
> organisation. Most of the miniconfs don't need sponsorship anyway, so this
> might seem unnecessarily fascist -- however, we have to work around multiple
> events harassing potential sponsors, and inappropriate commercialisation of
> the miniconfs (such as a miniconf being run by a company, for their own
> interests). Mostly, it means "no banners, no advertising, no naming rights".

> In terms of the Foundation, while it can't sponsor "GNOME.conf.au", there is
> no issue whatsoever with the Foundation funding travel/accomodation for an
> attendee (much like a company will pay for a staff members to attend, but
> this would not be considered "sponsorship").

Just for clarification, I was only thinking in terms of travel
sponsorship. Oh and T-shirts. After all, in some respects, the
Foundation already has naming rights over the conference, and its brand
appears on all the materials, the Foundation is not a corporate interest
and is in essence "the community".

Obviously things would be different if I had gone to say... Redhat.

At this point, I think we need to see who is receiving travel
sponsorship for the main linux.conf.au event. Perhaps the Foundation
could start a program to get one or two exciting speakers to every GNOME
conference (I understand we already do this, but more on a case by case
basis). Ideally this system would be on some sort of rotation, that is,
"while $hacker is remarkably cool and would have interesting things to
say, he's had his free/discounted trip, so we should give someone else a
go". Obviously this program would only be available to Foundation
members (something concrete for being a member?) and for a conference
like GUADEC where lots of people are flown in, still only apply to one
or two people (so that we can still have all the core hackers).

Just floating ideas around at this point.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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