Re: advisory board fees

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

How about this? Feedback is welcome

Subject: GNOME Foundation 2010 Donations (income? fees?)

GNOME Advisory Board Members,

2010 will be a key year for the GNOME Foundation with the release of GNOME 3.0. We'd like to make sure we have sufficient income to hold several key hackfests and to support a small staff. In order to do this, we need your help.

In 2010, we'd like to have:

• A small staff that enables the community to be effective. We believe the minimum staff to keep everything running most effectively is an executive director, part time administrative assistant and a system administrator. These staff skills will complement and enable our community of GNOME contributors. Having contributors who are excellent hackers, artists and documentation writers take time off to do system administration work or reimburse travel expenses is not the most effective use of our resources.
  
• Establish a regular and reliable schedule for hackfests, as these are essential for getting past roadblocks and getting new initiatives going, such as GNOME 3.0! In 2009 we had plans for many key hackfests and due to the economy and the way we had fundraising set up, we were unable to do any of the ones we had planned for the first half of the year.
  

Maintaining a small staff and a regular schedule of key hackfests will enable us to:

• Recruit and integrate new contributors quickly. GNOME's popularity and the size of its community depends on integrated and running web infrastructure. There are some efforts underway to make this happen, for example, we are updating our web site to more easily enable contributions from more people,upgrading bugzilla to improve everyone's working speed and we are adding a CRM system. This is a lot to do, which is why we need a regular system administrator who can ensure that existing contributors work effectively and new contributors come up to speed quickly.
  
• Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done. GNOME 3.0 was started at the usability hackfest at last year's Boston Summit. The GTK hackfest made tremendous progress last year and the documentation hackfest this year not only improved Mallard but set an example for other free software projects. In the following year, we would like to have hackfests for GNOME 3.0 usability, user deployment, accessibility, Zeitgeist and marketing. We need to make sure the income we can count on can support a few key hackfests without additional money.
  

We have worked on making this plan a reality by raising more money and spending the money we have more effectively. For example:

• We raised money in new ways, like Friends of GNOME which has raised $20,000 this year! (This is up 312% from last year when we raised only from $6400 over the whole year.)
• We've signed up 3 new sponsors. Given the current economy, that was a great result. It's reasonable to assume to pick up some more when the economy improves.
  
• We established a travel committee, which greatly improved the GNOME Foundation's efficiency in sponsoring travel. By organizing lodging as well as approving airfare, the travel committee was 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.
  

While all this has helped us, it has turned out to be insufficient to accomplish our basic plans for staffing and hackfests. Thus, we ask you to consider to raise your support by accepting a raise in advisory board members fees.

• 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 when the GNOME Foundation first started is only $7,892 in today's dollars.)
• You, as companies vested in the interest of GNOME, will profit from these plan, too. All the companies in our community will benefit from a better system administration structure that enables new members to join quickly as well as existing members to function most effectively. You will also benefit from usability and accessibility hackfests that affect GNOME 3.0 projects. Any marketing effort the GNOME Foundation does for the free desktop will help all of the companies that currently use and deploy GNOME technologies.
• Many of you support us throughout the year, but in a year with a weak economy it's hard to keep up those donations throughout the year. While we hope that you'll continue to support us throughout the year, by having a larger annual donation up front, we hope to have more reliability.
  

In 2010 we'll be asking all large advisory board companies to support
the GNOME Foundation with $20,000 and smaller companies with $10,000.
While we realize this is a big increase, we think overall the
additional money will help our community of 400+ Foundation members to
make a much bigger impact in the world of free software and the GNOME
desktop.

Thanks in advance for supporting our 2010 initiatives.

Best,

Stormy

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:42 AM, Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com> wrote:

On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 18:38 -0600, Stormy Peters 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.

I don't have all the necessary facts, but I'd probably frame it this way
(the ? indicates where you'd need a find an appropriate word to describe
the facts):

1.) We'd like to be able to ...

   * employ a sysadmin.
   * establish a regular (?), reliable (?) schedule for hackfests.

2.) These are good ideas, because ...

   * GNOME's popularity and the size of its community depends on
integrated and running web infrastructure. There are some efforts
underway to make this happen, for example, ... (insert list of planned
sysadmin activities here.) This is a lot to do, which is why we need a
regular sysadmin.
   * Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done.
(Insert success stories here). In the following year, we planned to care
about (insert list of plans here). We need to make sure the income we

can count on can support key hackfests without additional money.

3.) We did our part on making this happen:

   * We raised money in other ways, like Friends of GNOME which has
raised $20,000 this year! (a comparison to the previous year would be
nice here.)
   * We've signed up 3 new sponsors. Given the current economy, that
was a great result. It's reasonable to assume to pick up some more when
the economy gets better, again.
   * We established (?) a travel committee, which greatly improved 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.

4.) However, it turned out to be insufficient.

5.) Thus, we ask you to consider to raise your support (by accepting (?)
a raise in advisory board members fees):

   * After all, 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.)

   * And you will profit from these plan, too. After all, (link reasons
from (2) to advisory board member's interests here).


Best regards,
Claus