Re: GNOME and KDE to Co-locate Flagship Conferences on Gran Canaria in 2009

["Quim Gil" <quimgil gmail com>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 8:41 PM, john palmieri
<john j5 palmieri gmail com> wrote:
> The one thing we have made clear to our Advisory Board is we do not want
> this to be an excuse for companies to invest less in either events.  That
> would be disastrous.

Sure, but who talked about getting less corporate money? In fact it
would be reasonable to get more since in terms of marketing and
awareness

(GUADEC + aKademy) > GUADEC + aKademy

Let's look at the numbers.

GUADEC and aKademy have very similar sponsorship schemes, which is
unsurprising considering that both marketing teams have been
collaborating on this topic since 2006. See
http://dot.kde.org/1205342263/ (I could only find GUADEC 2008 brochure
in an attachment).

GUADEC Cornerstone = aKademy Platinum = 25.000€
Gold is same in both = 15.000€
Silver is same in both = 5.000€
aKademy has also Bronze = 1.000€

Do the math and put 3 levels at 50.000€, 30.000€ and... 5.000€

Looking at the past editions of both events, reasonable candidates for
a Gold are Nokia, Novell, Canonical the Linux Foundation and perhaps
Google. One of them to be pushed to the top level. There are some
GUADEC silvers that could be tempted to upgrade to gold.

The current Silvers come mainly from the GNOME side, which makes sense
due to the decentralized corporate nature of the GNOME project. This
is why I'm suggsting to keep Silver at 5000€ or do an upgrade to 6000€
at most in exchange of a much higher visibility. In fact many of these
companies work on components compatible with KDE technologies and/or
in the freedesktop.org domain.

It would be also reasonable to think that more silvers might appear
since we are getting more new ones in every GUADEC and most of the
current sponsors repeat. The whole mobile stuff might bring new names
e.g. those around the LiMo foundation.

Conclusion: same or more money to be invested with less organizational
costs (thanks to sharing instead of doubling overheads) --> more money
to sponsor contributors from more remote places and work better on the
social side of the events.


> This is not a joint event.  The GNOME Board and KDE eV
> agreed on this with the understanding that we are co-located, not one
> conference.  Some details can be shared but most of it should be treated as
> we just happen to show up at the same time and place.  Its buisness as usual
> for the most part.  If we wanted a joint conference we would have just
> thrown a Freedesktop.org event.

For what we have seen in this thread there are some coincident
opinions among the coordinators of GUADEC 2006 and 2007 + the main
hunter of sponsors and keynotes in the past years (Baris is excused
for being afk). There must be something to consider here.

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://flors.wordpress.com