Re: Meeting Minutes Published - March 29th, 2011

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Martyn:

On 04/26/11 02:11 AM, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On 18/04/11 18:01, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > On 18/04/11 16:34, Stormy Peters wrote:
> No comments from anyone on this?

Here are my thoughts...

> I could put something a bold on the gtk.org website, but I would rather
> we had something more centralised on gnome.org for all companies?
>
> I get the feeling there isn't much interest in this?

I think there is a lot of interest, actually.

For a long time, The GNOME Foundation has been discussing how to make
it more possible to partner with other organizations.  Lately we have
been talking about how to better promote organizations that do GNOME or
GTK+ consulting.  There is also value in providing some way to promote
organizations that wish to donate or provide resources to The GNOME
Foundation.  Perhaps we should be working to solve the larger problem?

For example, there have been several occasions where organizations
have approached The GNOME Foundation wanting to donate funds with the
idea of doing a link exchange.  We have turned away such offers in
the past simply because The GNOME Foundation currently does not have
the infrastructure to do this - namely there is no clear place on the
GNOME website, GNOME planet, GNOME blogs, etc. to put such links or
advertisements.  We could also probably do more things like associating
donor logos with events to better encourage donations and fund raising.
For example, perhaps we could do more to sell package sponsorships where
an organization could get their logo associated with a number of events
over the year for a more reasonable cost than doing them all separately.

Another example is that sometimes organizations do things like donate
a server or computer to The GNOME Foundation.  The GNOME website does
not currently have a nice place to say thanks about such things.  The
Friends of GNOME has a page to thank previous donors[1], but it does
not seem the right place to thank organizations, and does not seem
particularly inspired anyway.

I also have some concern about what the larger GNOME Foundation
community even thinks about doing such things.  Putting ads on a
website can make for negative reactions, especially if not done
tastefully.  I would think this would be a concern regardless of
whether promoting GTK+ or GNOME consulting firms, or organizations in
general.

In all of these situations, I would think that The GNOME Foundation
would only want to be seen as endorsing organizations that are
reputable and reasonably aligned with The GNOME Foundation's mission
to promote GNOME and Free Software.  So, there likely is a need to
have some process to review and approve offers to promote such
organizations or consulting firms.

At any rate, if there is interest in tackling this problem, it seems
like it might make most sense to solve the more general problem.  These
problems are so similar that it would probably be easier to tackle both
at once and I think it would help this project gain traction.

Brian

[1] http://www-old.gnome.org/friends/previous-donors.html