Brochure for potential sponsors: need help!

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

As I work to recruit companies as GNOME Foundation sponsors, it would be really helpful to have a brochure that describes what GNOME is, the GNOME Foundation, why they should sponsor and what is entailed. It should be something that looks good online as well as printed on a single sheet of paper. (Either one or two sided, or folded in three like a brochure.)

I've put together some text, but could really use some help with the layout and graphics. I'm thinking we could even reuse the GUADEC type look and feel.

While this might not go to hundreds of companies, every company that we do recruit is at least $10,000/year for the GNOME Foundation. That pay for a lot of travel for developers or with a handful of those we could hire a system administrator.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help!

Best,

Stormy

GNOME

The GNOME Project is an effort to create a
complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment accessible to all, a
powerful application development framework for software developers, and
a set of free software applications for mobile devices. GNOME is part
of the GNU Project, is Free Software,
      and developed as Open
      Source software. 

The
GNOME project encompasses many applications from the desktop to
multimedia applications for end users to development tools. See http://projects.gnome.org/ for the entire list.

The GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation supports the GNOME project goal of creating a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.

To achieve this goal, the Foundation coordinates releases of GNOME and determines which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation acts as the official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences, and represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help create technical standards for the project and promote the use and development of GNOME software.

The Foundation has over 400 members, all contributors to GNOME, who vote once a year to elect the GNOME Board of Directors who run the Foundation. The Foundation has two people on staff, an executive director and an administrator.

The Foundation also has 20 corporate sponsors and a board of advisors that represent the corporate sponsors. Corporate sponsors include Access, Canonical, Debian, Free Software Foundation, HP, Google, IBM, Igalia, Immendio, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, OLPC, OpenedHand, Red Hat, Software Freedom Law Center, Sugar Labs and Sun.

Why join the GNOME Foundation as a sponsor:

1)
Open source technologies are forming
the building blocks of desktop and mobile computing platforms. By using open source
technologies, companies can focus on adding their value add, branding
both the open source pieces and their applications, in a unique
solution for end users. 

2) The foundation provides a conduit to the developers. Developers
working on GNOME technologies whether they work at large corporations,
small consulting firms or as hobbyists. 


3) As an advisory board member, through regular phone meetings and an annual face
to face meeting, you will have a high-value communication channel with the
GNOME community, through the board of directors. 

4)
The advisory board also
provides the ideal forum for improved collaboration on areas of common
interest
among distributors of the GNOME products. Many of our members value the
chance to speak and collaborate with partners and competitors about GNOME technologies.

5)
The foundation invests in tasks which the community has done well,
including a comprehensive program for
independent software developers. We currently have a
part-time assistant and a full-time director who will
support the GNOME community and grow interest in the desktop and the
platform. We are looking to hire a system administrator in the near
future.

6) As you know, the more you work with the community and the more
awareness they have of your plans, the more supportive they will be
when you need help. By joining the GNOME Foundation and sponsoring
GNOME, you will create good will among GNOME developers. They know that
the GNOME Foundation fees go towards things that help GNOME developers
like hackfests, sponsoring travel to conferences, and system
administration resources.

7) General press. If you agree, we would like to issue a press
release announcing your support. It would reach a large number of
international press people, technologists and businesses. We would of
course follow up with press coverage of GNOME related
initiatives and announcements throughout the year.

Sponsorship fees are
$10,000/year. Most sponsors are also invited to join the GNOME Foundation Board of
Advisors. The advisory board meets in person annually at GUADEC and
holds regular teleconference calls throughout the year. 

Most sponsors also provide additional funding for specific programs like events and programs targeted at specific technologies.

During 2008 the GNOME Foundation was able to help bring a free and open source desktop to the world by doing the following:

• Participated in Google Summer of Code in which 30 students and mentors participated. They worked on improving f-spot (an application to manage photos), improving anjuta (integrated development environment), improving cheese (webcam application, similar to photobooth), and working on avahi to support LLMNR (which is the Windows technology similar to zeroconf, iirc). See a complete list of projects here.
• Ran an Accessibility Outreach Program that resulted in improvements in documentation, magification and mouse control through a webcam. In addition, several smaller tasks like bug fixing were accomplished as well. See a complete list of the tasks here.
• Held a GTK+ hackfest that was widely seen as successful for getting the GTK+ developers together and was essential for planning the future of GTK+. We plan to build on this success by using the hackfest model for other GNOME technologies. We are currently planning hackfests around topics like usability, desktop search, internet/desktop integration, GNOME Mobile, accessibility, profiling, and performance.
• Held several world wide developer conferences to enable developers to collaborate effectively and to educate new users and developers. In Europe, our volunteer run conference, GUADEC, brought 300 GNOME developers together. This year we had the first GNOME event in Asia, GNOME.Asia, that was held in October 18-19th in Beijing with 300 Asian attendees.

In 2009, we could use your help to accomplish the following:

• Produce more end user and need focused technology and features through technology specific hackfests. Hackfests are an event where a core team of project developers get together and spend a week in the same place, discussing plans and writing code. They are particularly useful for getting new projects or large features launched (like GTK+ 3.0) or getting a large amount of code written.
• Ensure a free and secure desktop environment for everyone.
• Continue to provide a place for our sponsors to come together to discuss their GNOME technology related plans.
• Organize a usability study focused on GNOME technologies used by all people including children, users in developing nations and people with accessibility needs.
• Provide travel subsidies to bring our world wide community of volunteer developers together. This enables them to work on existing projects, plan new projects and work with partners and companies that use GNOME technologies.
• Have more active dialogs between our sponsor companies and our developers through monthly advisory board meetings. This is one way to bring end user and distribution company needs to GNOME developers.
• Hold a joint GUADEC/Akademy conference, a Free Desktop Summit, in order to encourage collaboration and common specifications.
• Ensure that there is a free and open source stack for mobile devices by working with other mobile groups to define and produce GNOME Mobile.
• Hire a system administrator to manage the GNOME infrastructure. The GNOME community has 1000s of volunteer contributors. The infrastructure to support them from mailing lists to bug tracking system to source code repositories is all maintained by volunteers. A contract system administrator could provide the on-call support that would give our volunteer developers and volunteer administrators with the resources they need to keep the GNOME project moving forward its mission of a free and open source desktop for all.
• Support local conferences like GNOME.Asia, GUADLAC (Latin America), Boston Summit, GNOME.conf.au (Australia) and Forum GNOME as a forum for community building, technology sharing, and bringing developers, companies and users closer together. Start an internship program aimed at exposing business students to the free and open source software world and bringing their expertise to some of the marketing and business challenges we have.
• Support the community on defining and executing a release plan for GNOME 3.0.

Thanks for your interest.

To follow up, please contact:

Stormy Peters
Executive Director
GNOME Foundation
stormy gnome org

970-481-2076