Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 05:31:25PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: On Sun, Sep 07, 2014 at 09:29:46PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: What LCA does every morning is IMHO a great addition to the conference: the orga team meets and then the whole conference assembles for a 20 minute session, when the orga team can relay information from the venue, share details about such events like the conference dinner or the day trip, or make all kinds of other announcements. This is not only useful to the organisers and front desk, because attendees do not always read their e-mail in time. This also serves to bring together everyone, which has a multitude of benefits. Yup, that sounds good. At DC14, for instance, having another session after dinner was IMHO great, because it reunited everyone, while previously, people would have split into groups before dinner and then that's the way you'd spend your evening, because you didn't know where the others were, let alone have a chance of randomly run into someone you always wanted to meet but didn't know about yet. But on this point I *cannot* disagree more strongly. AIUI the post-dinner slot was not a deliberate choice by the DC14 team and was essentially forced on us by the inflexibility/infelicities of the catering folks? An extra session tacked on the end of the day *after* many people have already left the venue to go for dinner spoils the day in multiple ways. The poor folks scheduled to give their talk in that slot end up with small/worse audiences due to people just not coming back, or coming back late, or nodding off in talks. For people who might want to do something different for dinner it ruins their choices: struggle to get somewhere, eat and back in a limited time-frame, or only leave the venue very late after that talk and get food late. Thanks for the reminder about this, I hadn't (yet) got around to saying this to feedback@... FWIW there were several times during DC14 that I found myself wishing for exactly this. So +1 for fixing this in DC15. +1 also. It's something I've made a point of doing in other events like the Cambridge mini-conf too - make sure there is a spot for announcements every morning at the start, plus potentially even after lunch too. It's invaluable. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.st...@einval.com Into the distance, a ribbon of black Stretched to the point of no turning back ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 1:35 AM, Michael Banck mba...@debian.org wrote: See Martin's reply to this one, the idea was to get people to all show up to the morning orga announcements and subsequent sessions (at least if they are interested in the raffle, we could record that in summit maybe). Initially, I feared pushback against any raffle as it may be deemed too commercial. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I also _strongly_ support the idea of using the raffle as a carrot for people to get out of bed and attend. First talk of the day is one of the worst time slots and this could really help fix that problem. Incentive-based crowd control tends to work rather well :) Richard -- Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Richard Hartmann richih.mailingl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 1:35 AM, Michael Banck mba...@debian.org wrote: See Martin's reply to this one, the idea was to get people to all show up to the morning orga announcements and subsequent sessions (at least if they are interested in the raffle, we could record that in summit maybe). Initially, I feared pushback against any raffle as it may be deemed too commercial. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I also _strongly_ support the idea of using the raffle as a carrot for people to get out of bed and attend. First talk of the day is one of the worst time slots and this could really help fix that problem. Incentive-based crowd control tends to work rather well :) The way I look at it, raffles are just a way to do higher value swag, that sponsors can't really justify giving to all attendees. -Brian Richard -- Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.com wrote: The way I look at it, raffles are just a way to do higher value swag, that sponsors can't really justify giving to all attendees. So you agree/disagree/don't care if they are given away in the morning (for some value of...) and require physical attendance during the actual raffle? Richard -- Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 7:06 PM, Richard Hartmann richih.mailingl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.com wrote: The way I look at it, raffles are just a way to do higher value swag, that sponsors can't really justify giving to all attendees. So you agree/disagree/don't care if they are given away in the morning (for some value of...) and require physical attendance during the actual raffle? I think it's an extension of what we have done in the past and have no objections. I'm curious to see how the experiment goes. I'm not sure I understand the first part of your question though? for some value of... As for the second, I don't have a strong feeling about requiring attendance, especially if the raffle isn't directly opposite any talks, and it isn't at a hugely inconvenient time. IE: I personally would defer this decision to the folks running the raffle, if it makes it easier to require attendance, I think it's fine. If they want to open all attendees, that's probably ok as well. -Brian Richard -- Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.com wrote: I'm not sure I understand the first part of your question though? for some value of... For some value of morning as I suspect the raffle would take place at 10:00 which is morning during DebConf, but almost noon during the rest of the year. As for the second, I don't have a strong feeling about requiring attendance, especially if the raffle isn't directly opposite any talks, and it isn't at a hugely inconvenient time. IE: I personally would defer this decision to the folks running the raffle, if it makes it easier to require attendance, I think it's fine. If they want to open all attendees, that's probably ok as well. I strongly suspect that whoever ends up running the raffle next year is already subscribed to this list today. Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, My last message on the topic, I don't want to drag this discussion for ever. First of all, I am a bit worried that there is not much discussion about this, saving for discussions about how to run a raffle. I saw just a couple of concerns about the points I am discussing here, and no endorsements. I cannot predict if the silence is due to endorsement or to not caring. I believe this is an important decision. Please people, speak up! On 10/09/14 00:35, Michael Banck wrote: Also, note that at DebConf14 basically everything we put in the brochure (before DC14 started) happened on an ad-hoc basis: the sponsor booth (some sponsors seemed to put up tables to talk to attendees), the job fair (rather inofficial, but still), the sponsoring of some events (in this case even the CW party, plus an off-site social event), the raffle etc. The amount of push-back was rather small I believe. I explicitly asked a couple of attendees I know well and believed they may be opposed to them, but they did not see the sky falling. It is true it was ad-hoc and the sky didn't fall. But the key point is that it was ad-hoc, and in the case of the CW, that it solved a problem for the organisers. Personally, I didn't like much the HP event being announced almost as something official, but did not want to cause a fuss about it either. Note that I am not opposing to the job fair or the booths. It is the sponsoring of the social events that I feel is kind of wrong, going against our spirit. It feels like monetising the conference, that's why I feel uneasy. I would rather cut the costs (or the existence) of all these (CW, dinner, day trip, sponsored beverages) than selling them. Finally, if the non-profit is forbidden to do theses things, we could have one or two sponsors give the money to a normal trusted company instead. Another topic. I just saw the addition to the brochure of the diversity effort. While I am all for getting money for diversity, what do you have in mind when you invite sponsors to contact us? It is just a way to get more sponsors on board, so we can then manage the money, or will they have any active involvement in the use of the money? -- Martín Ferrari (Tincho) ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Sun, Sep 07, 2014 at 09:29:46PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: 2. You can never have too much money, because if we do it right, it just means we can sponsor more people to attend, or build a financial buffer for future DebConfs — we will have problems in the future at some point… I agree that we ought not come across as greedy, but this really depends on what we put into the final report. You certainly can have too much money; frankly, I'm surprised that anyone on the team would suggest otherwise. The simplest provable definition of too much money is if the conference has become so tainted by corporate messaging in exchange for that money, that we no longer have enough Debian folks interested enough to come to the conference to use up our travel sponsorship budget. I don't say that this is the case with the current plan, but I think it /is/ important to recognize that being too successful at fundraising does actually represent an existential danger to DebConf. If I compare our offerings to what I've seen with other conference sponsoring programmes, we are *cheap*. Are you comparing DebConf to other conferences of similar size (200-300 attendees)? If we really are cheap for the size, then isn't that an argument for, instead of adding extra perks, being more aggressive in our fundraising? Or perhaps increasing the prices on our sponsorship levels? (If this doesn't sound practical, then I would dispute the claim that we are cheap as it clearly means we're priced right for the market :) In my opinion, I would slash all these extra perks. There are other reasons at work than just wanting more money. One of them lies in the nature of the non-profit in Germany, because paying a nice dinner for everyone, or sending people into nature, is not considered an expense that is tax exempt in Germany (which makes sense to me, btw…) For clarification: does the fact that these expenses are not tax-exempt pose problems for the non-profit status of the organization as a whole? Or does it just mean additional tax paperwork / tax to be paid? I think it's legitimate for the team to question whether we want to accept direct sponsorship of certain events which are not tax-exempt expenses, vs. accepting the penalty of paying tax (and/or doing tax paperwork). What LCA does every morning is IMHO a great addition to the conference: the orga team meets and then the whole conference assembles for a 20 minute session, when the orga team can relay information from the venue, share details about such events like the conference dinner or the day trip, or make all kinds of other announcements. This is not only useful to the organisers and front desk, because attendees do not always read their e-mail in time. This also serves to bring together everyone, which has a multitude of benefits. At DC14, for instance, having another session after dinner was IMHO great, because it reunited everyone, while previously, people would have split into groups before dinner and then that's the way you'd spend your evening, because you didn't know where the others were, let alone have a chance of randomly run into someone you always wanted to meet but didn't know about yet. FWIW there were several times during DC14 that I found myself wishing for exactly this. So +1 for fixing this in DC15. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 2:31 AM, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: You certainly can have too much money; frankly, I'm surprised that anyone on the team would suggest otherwise. The simplest provable definition of too much money is if the conference has become so tainted by corporate messaging in exchange for that money, that we no longer have enough Debian folks interested enough to come to the conference to use up our travel sponsorship budget. I don't say that this is the case with the current plan, but I think it /is/ important to recognize that being too successful at fundraising does actually represent an existential danger to DebConf. You seem to be mixing up having a lot of money and selling out. They can be correlated, agreed. Yet, in the context of what madduck said, I read this as a making more money is better and I agree with that sentiment. For clarification: does the fact that these expenses are not tax-exempt pose problems for the non-profit status of the organization as a whole? Or does it just mean additional tax paperwork / tax to be paid? IANAL, but from what we gathered it's the former. Richard ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 02:41:17AM +0200, Richard Hartmann wrote: On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 2:31 AM, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: You certainly can have too much money; frankly, I'm surprised that anyone on the team would suggest otherwise. The simplest provable definition of too much money is if the conference has become so tainted by corporate messaging in exchange for that money, that we no longer have enough Debian folks interested enough to come to the conference to use up our travel sponsorship budget. I don't say that this is the case with the current plan, but I think it /is/ important to recognize that being too successful at fundraising does actually represent an existential danger to DebConf. You seem to be mixing up having a lot of money and selling out. They can be correlated, agreed. Yet, in the context of what madduck said, I read this as a making more money is better and I agree with that sentiment. Except that the proposal is precisely to make more money by giving sponsors more, not just by getting more money for the same benefits as before. We should not subscribe to a blind policy of doing this. For clarification: does the fact that these expenses are not tax-exempt pose problems for the non-profit status of the organization as a whole? Or does it just mean additional tax paperwork / tax to be paid? IANAL, but from what we gathered it's the former. Ok. And how about if SPI pays these expenses? Since they are legitimate expenses for a US non-profit, this doesn't impact SPI's tax-exempt status. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 01:09:25AM +0100, Martín Ferrari wrote: Hi, My last message on the topic, I don't want to drag this discussion for ever. First of all, I am a bit worried that there is not much discussion about this, saving for discussions about how to run a raffle. I saw just a couple of concerns about the points I am discussing here, and no endorsements. I cannot predict if the silence is due to endorsement or to not caring. I believe this is an important decision. Please people, speak up! On 10/09/14 00:35, Michael Banck wrote: Also, note that at DebConf14 basically everything we put in the brochure (before DC14 started) happened on an ad-hoc basis: the sponsor booth (some sponsors seemed to put up tables to talk to attendees), the job fair (rather inofficial, but still), the sponsoring of some events (in this case even the CW party, plus an off-site social event), the raffle etc. The amount of push-back was rather small I believe. I explicitly asked a couple of attendees I know well and believed they may be opposed to them, but they did not see the sky falling. It is true it was ad-hoc and the sky didn't fall. But the key point is that it was ad-hoc, and in the case of the CW, that it solved a problem for the organisers. Personally, I didn't like much the HP event being announced almost as something official, but did not want to cause a fuss about it either. +1 Note that I am not opposing to the job fair or the booths. It is the sponsoring of the social events that I feel is kind of wrong, going against our spirit. It feels like monetising the conference, that's why I feel uneasy. Yep. I would rather cut the costs (or the existence) of all these (CW, dinner, day trip, sponsored beverages) than selling them. I'd go for it too. Although madduck's answer to my concerns on this made me believe that they won't go to extremes :) I have a feeling that all these new sponsoring experiments will create more trouble than fixings/improving things. Actually I think we're trying to fix a non-issue. Regarding the raffle, oh... I know I'm looking like the annoying guy here but I'll let you know my opinion anyway: if one really needs a raffle to attend a talk/meeting on the morning I prefer keep one saving time and energy in his/her bed. Regards, -- tiago ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz ti...@debian.org wrote: Hi, On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 01:09:25AM +0100, Martín Ferrari wrote: Hi, My last message on the topic, I don't want to drag this discussion for ever. First of all, I am a bit worried that there is not much discussion about this, saving for discussions about how to run a raffle. I saw just a couple of concerns about the points I am discussing here, and no endorsements. I cannot predict if the silence is due to endorsement or to not caring. I believe this is an important decision. Please people, speak up! On 10/09/14 00:35, Michael Banck wrote: Also, note that at DebConf14 basically everything we put in the brochure (before DC14 started) happened on an ad-hoc basis: the sponsor booth (some sponsors seemed to put up tables to talk to attendees), the job fair (rather inofficial, but still), the sponsoring of some events (in this case even the CW party, plus an off-site social event), the raffle etc. The amount of push-back was rather small I believe. I explicitly asked a couple of attendees I know well and believed they may be opposed to them, but they did not see the sky falling. It is true it was ad-hoc and the sky didn't fall. But the key point is that it was ad-hoc, and in the case of the CW, that it solved a problem for the organisers. Personally, I didn't like much the HP event being announced almost as something official, but did not want to cause a fuss about it either. +1 Note that I am not opposing to the job fair or the booths. It is the sponsoring of the social events that I feel is kind of wrong, going against our spirit. It feels like monetising the conference, that's why I feel uneasy. Yep. I thought about the HP event, which was quite different than the PuppetLabs sponsored CW party. Other than people knowing who the CW party was sponsored by, I think we managed to keep commercialism at bay. If there is an understanding that beyond being listed as the event sponsor, there are no sponsorship benefits for funding the CW party, I personally didn't find it problematic. I really enjoyed the CW party. (It was my first, so don't have a frame of comparison.) That said, I don't feel super strongly about this, and if folks wanted to keep it off the sponsored list, it shouldn't be an issue, as we probably don't need it on the list. The HP event on the other hand did sound overtly commercial. However, it was not an official DebConf event. Many people just skipped it, myself included. (I assumed it was basically a recruiting event.) The fact is, any company, whether a DebConf sponsor or not, can throw a party during DebConf and invite the attendees. (via a staff member emailing -discuss for example.) The question then becomes whether or not we are willing to announce it. I think the answer is probably yes, as long as it's clear that the event is not part of the DebConf program, and they are a sponsor that qualifies to give swag. I say this because I view it as akin to swag; something beneficial to an attendee that has marketing value to the company giving it. Looking at it this way, couldn't it just be digital swag? A ticket to a sponsor's corporate event. If not, I guess we could tell them to print tickets and put them in the conference bag, but that might be picking nits. I would rather cut the costs (or the existence) of all these (CW, dinner, day trip, sponsored beverages) than selling them. I'd go for it too. Although madduck's answer to my concerns on this made me believe that they won't go to extremes :) I have a feeling that all these new sponsoring experiments will create more trouble than fixings/improving things. Actually I think we're trying to fix a non-issue. Largely agreed, but I think we're at a point where we've removed the most controversial ideas, and are talking about safe tweaks, that are more in the realm of individual preference. IE: In the interest of finishing the brochure, I am largely supporting the most recent draft, if the team proposing the changes are willing to do the extra coordination work involved. Regarding the raffle, oh... I know I'm looking like the annoying guy here but I'll let you know my opinion anyway: if one really needs a raffle to attend a talk/meeting on the morning I prefer keep one saving time and energy in his/her bed. My feeling here is if folks want to run a raffle, and sponsors are willing to give raffleable swag, I don't think it hurts. I know in the not so recent past companies have donated laptops/netbooks to DebConf and those were somehow given to attendees. If people want to sleep-in they always can. (Realistically I am not so sure I buy that this will work as an incentive to get people to come to early slot if they are night owls anyway , but I think a raffle that doesn't conflict with talks, can't hurt.) Regards, -- tiago ___ Debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 10:41:20PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote: [...] My feeling here is if folks want to run a raffle, and sponsors are willing to give raffleable swag, I don't think it hurts. I know in the not so recent past companies have donated laptops/netbooks to DebConf and those were somehow given to attendees. If people want to sleep-in they always can. (Realistically I am not so sure I buy that this will work as an incentive to get people to come to early slot if they are night owls anyway , but I think a raffle that doesn't conflict with talks, can't hurt.) I agree with you here, I may have expressed myself badly. I'm fine with it if the raffle doesn't disturb any official event/space (including hacklabs) and if it doesn't take much energy from the localteam to negociate it with sponsors. Also, I don't like the idea of publicizing the raffle as a motivating factor to attend DC events. I can't find words now to express this, but it sounds to me a kind of legitimation of laziness, DebConf officially tolerating the fact that a small chance to win a random gadget is more motivating to attendees (who're mostly sponsored) than the opportunity to join a presencial discussion relevant for the project. Regards, -- tiago signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On 09/10/2014 11:09 PM, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote: Also, I don't like the idea of publicizing the raffle as a motivating factor to attend DC events. I can't find words now to express this, but it sounds to me a kind of legitimation of laziness, DebConf officially tolerating the fact that a small chance to win a random gadget is more motivating to attendees (who're mostly sponsored) than the opportunity to join a presencial discussion relevant for the project. Thanks for bringing this up, Tiago. I share your sentiment -- i'd rather that the raffle is done at a time when people are free and that explicitly doesn't conflict with scheduled activities, rather than use it as bait to convince people to come participate in an event. If people are at an event just because they wanted to win a prize, i'm not sure that actually contributes much to the event itself. As someone who participated in the raffles this year (and even won one of them, thanks to our sponsors), i was a little annoyed that the scheduling seemed close to slipping into overlap with scheduled talk sessions. I think we should make it clear to sponsors that (a) raffles or other distracting time-specific events *must not* overlap with the scheduled talks, and (b) debconf attendees tend toward night-owl sides, so (depending on who you want to be visible to) you might want to encourage the scheduling of your raffle accordingly. If we want to make the raffle even more visible (for higher sponsorship?) we could include it in the schedule; this would require coordination with the schedulers on the talks team. --dkg signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, On Sun, Sep 07, 2014 at 02:06:40AM -0700, Martín Ferrari wrote: I think the job fair may be a good way to get more sponsors on board, and perhaps that we should limit our innovations until we see how that goes.. Maybe we don't need more money than that? In my opinion, I would slash all these extra perks. I've changed the language slightly now to not make it seem as if a prospective sponsor is entitled to it just because they are the first to say I want. I think it is important that we can still say no (and actually decide later on when a sponsor actually inquires about it) whether we want a sponsor to support a part of the conference in a particular way, while still gauging the interest. Also, note that at DebConf14 basically everything we put in the brochure (before DC14 started) happened on an ad-hoc basis: the sponsor booth (some sponsors seemed to put up tables to talk to attendees), the job fair (rather inofficial, but still), the sponsoring of some events (in this case even the CW party, plus an off-site social event), the raffle etc. The amount of push-back was rather small I believe. I explicitly asked a couple of attendees I know well and believed they may be opposed to them, but they did not see the sky falling. About the raffle, if we are going to make it official, I like the idea of moving the actual raffle to something that DC controls; and I would probably set some rules on what can be done. For example, I would forbid the raffle to require being there to claim the prize. That's forcing people to pay attention to the raffle, when they might be doing something else. See Martin's reply to this one, the idea was to get people to all show up to the morning orga announcements and subsequent sessions (at least if they are interested in the raffle, we could record that in summit maybe). Michael ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi Marga, On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 06:44:05PM -0700, Margarita Manterola wrote: Following intense discussions within the DC15 team and the sponsorship team, we believe we have finished the DC15 sponsorship brochure. In doing so we have removed the points that were questioned and incorporated the feedback from the sponsorship team, and also talked to a few (potential) sponsors and tried to get a good feeling of the attractiveness of our offering. You can find the generated PDF here: http://scratch.madduck.net/dc15-sb.pdf And the source code at: http://git.debian.org/?p=debconf-data/dc15.git/sponsorship-brochure In the purpose of summarizing the content, these are the sponsor levels: Bronze Level: € 2,000 Silver Level: € 5,000 Gold Level: € 10,000 Platinum Level: € 20,000 As it was this year, silver level is the minimum to get on the T-shirts. And most perks related to levels have stayed the same, with the addition of space at the job fair for silver and up, and space for a booth during opening weekend for gold and up. Thanks for posting the draft. The questions that come to mind for me are: * Job fair: do we have some idea of how much this will cost to accommodate? For instance, suppose for some reason we got no gold or platinum sponsors next year and all of our sponsorship came from contributors at the silver level; and all of these came in at the silver level. Where would that put us in terms of being able to afford putting on the conference, and how much space (and how much effort) would the job fair consume? (I think the idea of formally offering a job fair is a reasonable one, we just should be sure that we're not doing it at the expense of our conference. Perhaps the DC15 team has already worked this out, but I haven't seen any of this on either the debconf-team list or the debconf sponsorship list.) * Showcase booth: how do we expect this to differ from the job fair itself? I.e.: why are these two different perks - will they be located in different spaces? Also, same question as for the job fair, what does it cost us to offer this to sponsors? * Raffle: this says one item during the daily morning assembly. Is this one per day, or one for the whole week? Should this vary by sponsorship level? What does the team plan to do if a top-level sponsor has more than one item that they want to raffle? If someone organizes their own raffle via debconf-discuss, what will you do? * Cheese Wine party: prior to DC14, when Oregon liquor regulations necessitated a more active involvement by the team in securing a venue, the CW party has to my understanding always been an unofficial event organized at no additional cost to the conference. I think it significantly changes the character of the event to make it an officially sponsored thing. Do we have no prospects of this being a self-organized event, perhaps off-site? * Snacks and beverages / coffee, tea, mate: my understanding of most of these additional sponsorship opportunities was that it made sense to have them directly sponsored to avoid problems for them being paid by the DC15 non-profit. But these are clearly not exceptional expenses for a conference; so why offer them for line-item sponsorship? -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi Tiago, On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 05:40:48PM -0400, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote: Sounds good to me, except for the Job Postings and Job Fair for Bronze sponsors. It gives enough visibility and it's intrusive enough to deserve a silver IMO. And please, do not consider having job tables inside hacklabs. For my information, is this last comment a response to the presence of vendor tables in the downstairs hacklab at DC14? If so, can you elaborate on how this was problematic? I think more detailed feedback will help the DC15 team better understand why this was an issue and avoid creating a similar situation next year. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi all,
First of all, I want to say that I really like the brochure. I think it
has a very nice structure, and makes a compelling case for sponsoring
the conference.
Now, to the other things :-)
I agree with Steve on all his comments, specially with the opinion about
the CW part; and I would extend my doubts about sponsoring to the rest
of the social events.
It seems to me that we are trying to increase the money we collect more
than what we might need, with the risk of losing a bit of the soul of
DebConf, or even make our sponsors think that we are being greedy.
I think the job fair may be a good way to get more sponsors on board,
and perhaps that we should limit our innovations until we see how that
goes.. Maybe we don't need more money than that?
In my opinion, I would slash all these extra perks.
About the raffle, if we are going to make it official, I like the idea
of moving the actual raffle to something that DC controls; and I would
probably set some rules on what can be done. For example, I would forbid
the raffle to require being there to claim the prize. That's forcing
people to pay attention to the raffle, when they might be doing
something else.
Lastly, a few bug reports:
Missing of:
Your contribution makes it possible for us to bring together a large
number {+of+} Debian contributors from [..]
I don't think this is true, the DebConf money is Debian money and we
cannot earmark it for the next DebConf:
Any surpluses will be legally bound to be used for the organisation of
future, non-profit Debian conferences.
The two paragraphs under tax-deductible donations are unclear, they
seem to be written separately and they repeat themselves. The thing
about having to make an invoice does not make sense to me, although
maybe that is because I am not an accountant :-)
The photo credits are not current: it mentions dc13 group photo, and
lacks the credits for the orga photo.
--
Martín Ferrari (Tincho)
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Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: * Job fair: do we have some idea of how much this will cost to accommodate? The specifics of the job fair are not in the brochure, but our idea of how this is going to work is that it will be during one limited period of time (e.g. one morning or one afternoon) during the opening weekend, in one sector of the venue that will be selected for the job fair, so that people that are not interested may avoid it. We haven't yet decided whether we are going to allow full sized booths or rather tables + banners/rollups, this depends a lot on how many sponsors decide to participate in the job fair. I don't expect the cost of accommodating the job fair will be more than a little bit of planning regarding space and tables. As said, we haven't worked out the details, it depends a lot on how many sponsors say that they will be present at the job fair. For instance, suppose for some reason we got no gold or platinum sponsors next year and all of our sponsorship came from contributors at the silver level; and all of these came in at the silver level. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Are you saying that because of the job fair starting at silver all sponsors will only want silver? If we get no platinum or gold, we are going to have a bad time, but that's totally independent of the job fair so I fail to see how it's related. * Showcase booth: how do we expect this to differ from the job fair itself? I.e.: why are these two different perks - will they be located in different spaces? Also, same question as for the job fair, what does it cost us to offer this to sponsors? Yes, the showcase booth will be in a more prominent place than the job fair. The only cost is giving those sponsors extra space (but that's why it's limited to the opening weekend), and maybe some extra time for coordinating with them, but they will need to handle the construction of the booth and all that themselves. Are you thinking of some extra cost that I fail to see? * Raffle: this says one item during the daily morning assembly. Is this one per day, or one for the whole week? Should this vary by sponsorship level? What does the team plan to do if a top-level sponsor has more than one item that they want to raffle? If someone organizes their own raffle via debconf-discuss, what will you do? In general, I think we are happy raffling stuff. If we get two items per day instead of one (or two items on some days, or even three) it would not be a problem. The idea is to have the raffle just before the first plenary session, so that people will wake up and be there for the first talk, and we are encouraging sponsors to give us stuff to raffle. It doesn't mean that they can't do the raffle on their own if they want, but rather that they know that they can also do this. * Cheese Wine party: prior to DC14, when Oregon liquor regulations necessitated a more active involvement by the team in securing a venue, the CW party has to my understanding always been an unofficial event organized at no additional cost to the conference. I think it significantly changes the character of the event to make it an officially sponsored thing. Do we have no prospects of this being a self-organized event, perhaps off-site? We have worked out the details with the hostel that will allow us to host the CW on-site, at a cost of €2.5 per person for cutlery+cleaning. This means a cost of €1000 if we were to get 400 attendees. Having seen how well received the sponsoring by Puppet Labs was this year, I don't see why it would be a problem to have a similarly non-intrusive sponsoring next year. Again, details haven't been worked out but I would imagine the sponsorship would amount to: 1) Cheese Wine party, sponsored by [foo] to appear in schedule entries 2) Rollups or banners during the party itself. Would this really change the character of the event? I think the character of the event already changed significantly when it became an official thing, organized by the DebConf organizers instead of an unofficial tongue-in-cheek thing done by the attendees for themselves. * Snacks and beverages / coffee, tea, mate: my understanding of most of these additional sponsorship opportunities was that it made sense to have them directly sponsored to avoid problems for them being paid by the DC15 non-profit. But these are clearly not exceptional expenses for a conference; so why offer them for line-item sponsorship? I don't understand this question, you are answering it yourself in the first part of the paragraph. -- Besos, Marga ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Thank you, Tincho, for taking the time to read through the brochure! also sprach Martín Ferrari tin...@debian.org [2014-09-07 11:06 +0200]: It seems to me that we are trying to increase the money we collect more than what we might need, with the risk of losing a bit of the soul of DebConf, or even make our sponsors think that we are being greedy. You are putting your finger exactly where it belongs. Without trying to portrait any official position or anything, I can give you two answers though: 1. It is and should always be our top priority not to lose the soul of DebConf, not even a little bit. It's a great choice of word you made here, because I think it *is* possible to change stuff about DebConf, even fundamental aspects, without changing the spirit of the conference. 2. You can never have too much money, because if we do it right, it just means we can sponsor more people to attend, or build a financial buffer for future DebConfs — we will have problems in the future at some point… I agree that we ought not come across as greedy, but this really depends on what we put into the final report. If I compare our offerings to what I've seen with other conference sponsoring programmes, we are *cheap*. In my opinion, I would slash all these extra perks. There are other reasons at work than just wanting more money. One of them lies in the nature of the non-profit in Germany, because paying a nice dinner for everyone, or sending people into nature, is not considered an expense that is tax exempt in Germany (which makes sense to me, btw…) About the raffle, if we are going to make it official, I like the idea of moving the actual raffle to something that DC controls; and I would probably set some rules on what can be done. For example, I would forbid the raffle to require being there to claim the prize. That's forcing people to pay attention to the raffle, when they might be doing something else. There's the idea of a raffle, and there's the idea of a morning plenary session, which we copied from LCA. Of course, we can have just any raffle, and it'll be good. However, there's more to the raffle, including the reason to require someone to be present to receive a prize. What LCA does every morning is IMHO a great addition to the conference: the orga team meets and then the whole conference assembles for a 20 minute session, when the orga team can relay information from the venue, share details about such events like the conference dinner or the day trip, or make all kinds of other announcements. This is not only useful to the organisers and front desk, because attendees do not always read their e-mail in time. This also serves to bring together everyone, which has a multitude of benefits. At DC14, for instance, having another session after dinner was IMHO great, because it reunited everyone, while previously, people would have split into groups before dinner and then that's the way you'd spend your evening, because you didn't know where the others were, let alone have a chance of randomly run into someone you always wanted to meet but didn't know about yet. So those morning plenary sessions help to bring people together. Consequently, the speakers of the first sessions don't have to fear being alone. At LCA, these sessions happen at 9:00, and because of the raffle and the inherent sadness of (the slim probability of) being chosen while still in bed (which means that there's another draw), almost all attendees scrape themselves off the mattress and attend. We are not proposing to have these plenary sessions at 09:00. Later would work. But if we stage a raffle as an incentive for people to attend these sessions — which are a benefit to the organisers — then we need to require that prize winners must be present. Lastly, a few bug reports: All fixed. I don't think this is true, the DebConf money is Debian money and we cannot earmark it for the next DebConf: Any surpluses will be legally bound to be used for the organisation of future, non-profit Debian conferences. First, I think we can earmark it. We are Debian. ;) But I do see your point, and we don't want to limit our possibilities, really. The final report puts it as: we raised a surplus, which will be returned to Debian to be used for funding future Debian Free Software activities. so I suggest to just say that the money is legally bound to be used for funding future Debian Free Software activities. The two paragraphs under tax-deductible donations are unclear, they seem to be written separately and they repeat themselves. The thing about having to make an invoice does not make sense to me, although maybe that is because I am not an accountant :-) … or tax advisor. I re-read, and I think they are fine. Maybe there are small improvements, but the points are: 1. You can have an invoice with VAT. This is what companies usually want/need. 2. You can also
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 2:29 PM, martin f krafft madd...@debconf.org wrote: So those morning plenary sessions help to bring people together. Consequently, the speakers of the first sessions don't have to fear being alone. At LCA, these sessions happen at 9:00, and because of the raffle and the inherent sadness of (the slim probability of) being chosen while still in bed (which means that there's another draw), almost all attendees scrape themselves off the mattress and attend. We are not proposing to have these plenary sessions at 09:00. Later would work. But if we stage a raffle as an incentive for people to attend these sessions — which are a benefit to the organisers — then we need to require that prize winners must be present. +1 for the conference overall - wake up, get there, morning announcements, get the day started. I suspect the same people will turn up even if there isn't a raffle. but raffles are fun,. +1 to help get more people up and moving for the first talks. +1 for a well defined start of day for the video team. (details are in my report) ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: (Hopefully) Last draft of the dc15 sponsorship brochure
Hi, On Sat, Sep 06, 2014 at 11:18:34PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: Hi Tiago, On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 05:40:48PM -0400, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote: Sounds good to me, except for the Job Postings and Job Fair for Bronze sponsors. It gives enough visibility and it's intrusive enough to deserve a silver IMO. And please, do not consider having job tables inside hacklabs. For my information, is this last comment a response to the presence of vendor tables in the downstairs hacklab at DC14? If so, can you elaborate on how this was problematic? I think more detailed feedback will help the DC15 team better understand why this was an issue and avoid creating a similar situation next year. It's a general comment, but yes, the first floor hacklab came to my mind when writing. I did some work on a table close to the Intel table. Many people came to Intel table to make questions about their job offers, which generates medium annoying noise. At some point we had the drawing and then it became near impossible to focus. Many people and lots of noise. My suggestion is to keep sponsor tables elsewhere. Hacklab is supposed to be a working place, preferably a silent one. Regards, -- tiago signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
