On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 06:40:18AM -0500, David Golden wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 6:26 AM, Philippe Bruhat (BooK)
> <philippe.bru...@free.fr> wrote:
> > - Laurent started to contact sponsors of past FPW, and also obtained
> > more contact information for a potential sponsor
>
> Do you have a "pitch" for sponsors? E.g. what's in it for them, a
> summary of results of previous hackathons, what they get for various
> donation levels?
>
> If you do, I could approach a company in NYC that has indicated
> they're looking for ways to support "the community". I think they're
> mostly looking for publicity to help with hiring, so a French
> conference doesn't help directly, but the hackathon gets blogged about
> a lot and if we ask people blogging to credit/thank the sponsors,
> maybe we can make the publicity bump more interesting to them.
>
Yes I do. Here's a rough translation of what we sent to the French sponsors:
Among the reasons why you use Perl, the most important ones are
certainly the number and more importantly the quality of the modules
available on CPAN.
The quality and exhaustivity of tests are pilars of the Perl
culture. To improve this quality even more, a team of high level
Perl developers meets in the same place once a year since 2008,
as part of the now traditional "Perl QA Hackathon" (QA stands for
"Quality Assurance").
In 2012, this hackathon will be held in Paris, and organized by the
French non-profit "Les Mongueurs de Perl".
We would like to gather a team of about thirty members of the
worldwide Perl community, all recognized for the quality of their
contributions, and invite them to Paris at the end of March 2012.
This is a work meeting, NOT a conference open to the general public:
the attendees are invited by the organizers (travel, accomodation
and catering are being sponsored) and they will be selected by a
committee (independent of the organizing non-profit).
These people will give their time, knowledge and energy for three
days, all for the greater good of the community; this is why we
would like to cover their costs from the best of our habilities.
The whole budget comes from sponsors (companies and also Perl
non-profit organisations). Because it's going to be limited, we
would like to spend most of it on the travel, accomodation and
catering costs.
Here's a short listing of what the previous QA hackathon brought to
Perl: a formalization of the TAP protocol, the CPAN Testers 2.0,
numerous bug fixes and improvements to the CPAN toolchain modules
(metacpan's front-end, various improvements --speed, bugs, releases--
to toolchain modules, such as Devel::Cover, cpanminus, etc), hours
of discussion that came to fruition over time, with the creation
or improvement of new tools. Gathering brilliant minds in the same
room for several days, isolated from the outside world, is always
beneficial to the community (and sometimes surprisingly so).
As a sponsor, your contribution to this event can be considered as
a way to give back to Perl, for all that Perl and CPAN gave you,
or as an investement in the future, from which you'll reap the fruits
all over the year, every time you'll use CPAN.
In return for your support, your logo will be shown in the meeting
rooms, and on all communication around the event. We have put the
event's web site live (at http://20122qa-hackathon.org/). The logos
of the sponsors will be shown on all pages, and a dedicated sponsors
page will contain descriptions and links.
Obviously, this event is not a direct communication tool with the
community, as a YAPC or a Perl workshop can be. But the effects
of the hackathon will be felt durably in the community, and on
the quality of Perl and CPAN.
Thanks a lot in advance,
Philippe Bruhat, Laurent Boivin,
Organisateurs du Perl QA Hackathon 2012
Feel free to improve and send to your prospective sponsors. :-)
--
Philippe Bruhat (BooK)
The world is a gamble and the only "sure thing" is that cheaters eventually
lose. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #23 (Epic))
