Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010

[Bryen M Yunashko <a11yrocks bryen com>]

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 10:15 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> SugarLabs hasn't been successful at all with raising so far, but I
> think they would be happy to assist (I'm not that active there these
> days).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tomeu 

I tend to agree that diverting resources by making Orca cross-platform
is not the best use of our resrouces (be it funding or human).

However, the question of raising funds is a separate issue and should be
tackled for the broader accessibility benefits of GNOME and other FOSS
projects.  I support Orca and know that someday, probably sooner than
later, I'll actually need to use it.  But GNOME's accessibility is more
than about catering to people with vision impairments.  And we need to
keep that in mind if GNOME is to remain a viable option to paid-software
solutions.   

Where there's a will, there's a way.  There's funding opportunities
abound to help us further development, raise awareness, and reach out to
users.  We just have to put our heads together.   For the last couple of
weeks, I've been sitting down and looking at what we need, terms of
funds, to go around and promote/market GNOME Accessibility beyond our
normal HFOSS circles.  And while the list of "where to go" grows, the
question of "How do we pay for this?" remains constant.  Take a look at
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/2011_Events which probably could be
even longer, but needs a way to actually pay for it.  :-)

And for every dollar I want to ask for funding promotional
opportunities, that's a dollar taken away from development
opportunities.  And I *don't* want to do that if I can avoid it.

CSUN alone, for a booth, costs us $2,000 and to give a presentation at
the conference costs us $375 per speaker.  CSUN is a very important
event for raising awareness outside of HFOSS and we certainly woke up
some people to our existence.  We're fortunate that we were able to
negotiate a waiver of the speaker fees this year, but we're told we
won't get that next year.

With more awareness and reaching out to more people in the accessibility
community/industry, as well as other organizations that have an indirect
stake in accessibility, the greater our chances of finding even more
funds to cover our initiatives of a truly open source accessibility
alternative.

This is one of the initiatives that GNOME-A11y outreach wants to pursue
for 2011.   So, why don't we expand this to bring together more heads
and create some sort of task force to address how we can find
opportunities, and fine tune our message of appeal.

And we shouldn't be thinking just about going to accessibility
organizations to ask for funding.  They're looking for funding as well.
We need to think beyond this because as I say many times, a11y is about
all of us, not just people with special needs.

Bryen M Yunashko
GNOME A11y Outreach
"Where Freedom and Accessibility Meet!"