Re: Help define new partnership roles with GNOME Foundation

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> currently GNOME offers other groups, companies or projects to join the
> Foundation as Advisory Board members. This -as you know- implies
> benefits and responsibilities for both sides: a fee to be payed, a seat
> in the advisory board calls, etc.

Non-profits on the AB don't pay a fee I think, do they?

The major advisory board issue is that if it gets too big, the overhead
of interacting with it goes up, and the value that we or any individual
member gets goes down.

> So, we -the Board- are asking for your feedback to brainstorm and try to
> define a role or model that would allow new organizations to partner
> with GNOME Foundation in a more consistent way.
> 
> Here are some ideas to discuss:
>  - Organizations doing humanitarian work: we definitely want to work
> with organizations that do work in the developing world. How best could
> we help them? What can we offer, can we really help them? Can they help
> us?

Put another way - what do we have to offer? Training, resources,
computers, visibility? We can think of all kinds of mutually beneficial
partnerships out there - but many NGOs are now very conscious of the
value of their brand, and sell it very expensively indeed.

One ideas that comes to mind: "Become a Friend of GNOME benefactor
before the end of December, and give an OLPC computer to a child" - 50%
of the first year's donation could go to another cause.

On learning from other NGOs, I think thaty we can't do much better than
looking at their fundraising documents and annual accounts :)

>  - For non profits or non business companies: should we have a
> one-size-fits-all donation fee for joining? should we judge case by
> case?

There's a world of difference between the Mozilla Foundation and the
Eclipse Foundation and (say) Debian. One size fits all is easier, but
leaves money on the table in some sense.

>  - AdBoard relationship: if we were to have a group of non AB
> organizations, should we have 'open' AB meetings where they can
> participate?

No - the ad board is the ad board. There is nothing to stop the board &
more generally the foundation working closely with (say) an education
working group. I would suggest that the education working group, if you
have one, should be essentially "universities where free software
development is taught" rather than "universities interested in
researching free software projects". To be frank, we have very little to
learn from the second.

>  - Some companies that use GNOME technology might be happy to support us
> with a logo exchange: how can we engage them and what can we offer and
> request concretely?

Engage with email first - we have contacts in pretty much every GNOME
partner & redistributor. Do you have a list of companies? Do you have a
logo? Is there a special logo for the logo exchange? These are all
things that were worked on by Jeff some years ago - reviving that would
be a nice first step.

> In the same fashion, here are some ideas about what we could offer:
>  - Recognition as a GNOME supporter
>  - A press release
>  - Presence in our website as supporters
>  - Promotion space in our website (as content, not ads)
>  - Consider them "sponsors" or "supporters" of certain events

- Access, cross-marketing (buy something from them, give to GNOME, buy
something from us, give to them)
- Feedback, access to our members
- Assistance in projects (perhaps the GNOME Foundation should start
doing some paid work which is related to its mission, and start charging
some people for training, consulting, etc)?
- Access to our users (certain types of partnership could be possible
with online services).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org