Re: Relations with other organizations

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

> I'm Gil Forcada, member of guifi.net[1] [2], a free, open an neutral
> network that started on Catalonia nearly 6 years ago.

Gil, thanks for starting this discussion.

> We want to spread the word about our project as much as we want (the
> same as GNOME and all projects) so we thought that it would be cool if
> the GNOME foundation and the guifi.net foundation could make an official
> endorsement somehow: I'm thinking in a press release, banner exchanges,
> keep a line of contact to let the other know projects that maybe
> interests it, giving support ...
>
> So I sent an e-mail to Stormy who then add Brian and finally Diego but
> they resolved that it would be better to talk in this mailing list.
>
> With the guifi.net foundation board member hat on I'm here to ask what I
> wrote above, but since I'm also involved on GNOME I'm also here help the
> GNOME foundation to establish a policy about relations with other
> organizations which are loosely tied with GNOME but that they still want
> to be somewhat related.

Right, the difficulty is that the GNOME Foundation does not currently
have any sort of program to allow interested organizations like
guifi.net to establish a closer relationship with the GNOME community.
Currently the GNOME Foundation does have relationship with the Advisory
Board, but has nothing to offer organizations that are not a good fit
for that forum.

Gil mentions that such a relationship could include press releases,
banner exchanges, and opportunities to promote each other.  This seems
reasonable, but it seems that it would make more sense to define a
general program that we could use going forward for any organization
interested in developing this sort of relationship.  It does not seem
to make sense to try and treat each request like this as a special
case.

The board was hoping to get some feedback from the marketing list
about how the GNOME community should go about setting up something
like this.

Brian