Re: advisory board fees

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 02:38, Stormy Peters<stormy gnome org> wrote:
> Hi GNOME Marketing Team,
>
> At the Advisory Board meeting at GUADEC we discussed raising advisory board
> fees. I took the action item to discuss it with this list and to come up
> with some messaging for existing advisory board members.
>
> I'd welcome any and all feedback on how best to explain and portray this to
> existing advisory board members.
>
> Some key points:
> * Our advisory board fees have been steady for 10 years.
> * Inflation, the value of the dollar and the economy have all changed during
> that time. ($10,000 in 1999 is only $7892 in today's dollars.)
> * We increased our staff costs a lot in the past year and that's resulted in
> a lot of things they said were good - we've seen a lot of activity in the
> past year.
> * In the past year we've accomplished a lot from marketing to co-locating an
> event with KDE to announcing plans to ship GNOME 3.0.
> * Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done (and the
> advisory board members all agree) but depending on them to support all of
> them turned out to be a bad idea in a downturn. We need to make sure the
> income we can count on can support key hackfests without additional money.
> * We are getting better at doing more with less - we're being more
> efficient. Take the travel committee for example. The travel committee is
> greatly improving the GNOME Foundation's efficiency in sponsoring travel. By
> organizing lodging as well as approving airfare, they were able to
> substantially increase the number of people who received travel assistance.
> For GUADEC 2009 they managed travel assistance for 39 people for $31,838.
> Compare that
> to 36 people for $41,000 in 2008.
> * We are raising money in other ways, like Friends of GNOME which has raised
> $20,000 this year!
> * We are signing up new sponsors. Since Stormy started we've signed up 3 new
> sponsors. We haven't had as much traction as we'd like because of the
> economy but expect it to pick up again soon.

When I read the above bullet list as a sponsor, the first three give
reasons why I could give more money. The rest to me sound to me like
reasons why I should not give more money (maybe even less) because
GNOME is more efficient, raising money in other ways, more sponsors
etc.

The 4th point about GCDS you could change in: Co-locating GUADEC with
KDE has had very positive effects for the Free desktop movement in
general but is financially less profitable for GNOME itself.

However in general I'd change the messaging to what will we do with
the extra money: (That sounds more positive in my opinion)
1. More hackfest. These have proven to be hugely successful and speed
up development
2. More permanent staff. Having Stormy on board has been a huge
success (some examples) E.g. a permanent sysadmin can make sure that
people do not have to wait that long for certain sysadmin stuff to
happen.
3. You can offer the sponsors some of these things (logo page with
sponsor story, quartely updates on roadmaps etc. etc.)we discussed a
while ago for the premium package

So basically tell them what they get for the 10,000$ extra and as a
final remark: the fees have been 10.000$ for 10 years already.

Jaap