Re: Sponsorship for hackfests

[Stormy Peters <stormy peters gmail com>]

The Foundation hasn't decided to cut back on hackfests. However, to fund them, we are going to have to come up with a new approach. Typically hackfests are funded by corporate sponsorship and that money is not readily available this year.

We can certainly do better at showing companies return on investment for hackfests (they support hackfests but have asked for more documented results.) One way to do that would be to dedicate part of the hackfest, the last afternoon perhaps, to blogging and writing about results.

But, even if we do that, I don't see us getting a lot of funding for hackfests from companies this year. So we need to come up with other ways to fund those that are important to the community. As Brian pointed out, Friends of GNOME, http://www.gnome.org/friends, is one way we can do that.

We have also looked at having smaller hackfests in conjuction with other events to reduce costs.

All ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Stormy

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:

Hi there,

In Behdad's mail on gtk-devel-list, Behdad explains on why the
foundation has decided to cut back on hackfests. This is a fair and
reasonable reason, by the way (his last mail in the thread explains the
financial aspect of it pretty well).

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-March/msg00165.html

I think that during those hackfests people work on problems that
companies, who donate sponsorship-money, are interested in.

I fear that we have done a bad job at explaining them what the things
were that we worked on. Maybe we didn't make the scope of those
hackfests broad enough.

I for example remember that in Berlin we had the idea of putting
interviews with the hackers online. I never found those.

This should be something the Foundation pushes for (given that they
funded many hackers' flights I think it's fair that the Foundation gets
at least some interviews with the hackers, to put online, in return).

I think that if we'd include a few of the young projects into the
hackfests, while explaining clearly to companies who are interested in
these projects that our hackers work on these projects and that their
sponsorship-money is used to for example pay for those hackfests, that
we'll get at least some of those 90% sponsor offers back.

That way they'll know that their sponsorship has a return of investment
in code too (not just advertisement at conferences and on the website).

Right now I can imagine that it's not always clear for sponsoring
companies to estimate what they get in return. In economic hard times
that means your sponsoring gets slashed from their budgets, indeed.

Candidate projects that come to my mind include: GObject-introspection,
Vala, Clutter, Tracker, GeoClue, Poky, DConf,  WebKit, ...

I'm sure I'm forgetting about a few hundred projects and I know gobject-
introspection has been among the hackfest projects.

To decide the projects we need a group that decides on how our "horizon
towards the future" should look like. Which is also something we lack at
GNOME in my humble opinion. (for many years)

I don't think waiting for better economic times is even an option.

Let's instead solve this.


Cheers,


--
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be

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