Re: Sponsorship for hackfests

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 13:02 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2009/3/31 Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>:

> Sorry, but being on a foreign country, for hacking purposes and still
> doing some blogging is hard enough. You can ask, but you can't enforce
> people to do it. 

Sorry, but I flat out disagree.

Those people get the opportunity to meet and work together with top
software developers and still often get travel expenses paid by the
foundation.

I don't know how spoiled you can be claiming that it's too hard to do
some work in return for that.

People who don't want to do something for the foundation in return
should realize how fscking lucky they are having a foundation paying for
such opportunities.

I have also rarely met people, at such hackfests, who sounded to me like
unwilling to help the foundation with this. Actually never.

> You're forgetting the nature of the project, some
> people is willing to do some work, like write code, and the foundation
> helps, forcing people to blog or write articles is going to do nothing
> but hold people back from gathering together and write code, and if it
> doesn't they can just not blog and say they didn't have time (and they
> will be probably right about this).
> 
> I understand your concern, but I encourage you to organize a hackfest,
> and try to push everyone to blog about it, and still, people in the
> outside would feel that the activities haven't been publitized enough.
> I'm talking with my experience on organizing the theming api hackfest
> here.

It's not only about people. It's also done for companies who would do
sponsorship offers. Management and architects at such companies value
such publicity different. They ie. learn from it what our future will
look like, whether or not we're heading in the right direction, etc.

I do think it's *very* important to show what we are up to.

-- 
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