Re: [Fsfe-uk] RFC: Sponsorship

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

I've been rac king 

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 12:43:54PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2003-10-15 10:57:39 +0100 Andrew Savory <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
> >(There's been references by Mark to "opinions expressed so far" ... I
> >haven't seen them on this list. Were they on the affs-cttee-cabal 
> >list?)
> 
> No.  The subject line of the messages referred to there was "UKFSN 
> makes a profit" and the archive is at 
> http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/fsfe-uk/2003-09/threads.html#00002
> 
> During that thread, people seemed keen on using the money for some 
> sort of "award" or "prize" for other free software projects, 
> discussing accounting in detail, but I don't know if anyone has acted 
> on that yet.  It seemed that only one person suggested using it for 
> AFFS running costs.  Other than "I believe that Marc..." you should 
> have seen it all before.
> 
> >I doubt listings on our web site would be much incentive - we don't 
> >get
> >even near the amount of traffic the FSF/FSFE gets. (How much traffic 
> >_do_
> >we get?)
> 
> I didn't know, so I just threw the logs through analog for a summary.  
> Output is at http://www.affs.org.uk/~mjr/webstats/ for now, but will 
> be removed later (or when I get flamed for something in it).  Headline 
> figure: 200 pages and 480 hits per day in the last week.
> 
> >  - how do we get their leaflets to AFFS events?
> 
> So far, it has been by people carrying them.  The 10000 uklinux.net 
> sponsored leaflets were delivered to our LinuxExpo stand by 
> uklinux.net.
> 
> >  - do we carry them away again at the end?
> 
> The 8000 uklinux.net sponsored leaflets were taken to Cambridge by a 
> debian-uk member after LinuxExpo.  (I'm not sure if he wants his name 
> published.)
> 
I think this is a pretty important issue, so I've been running
it around my head.

Here's my suggestion:
create a donors page with a short URL, maybe list them in
order of monetary donation, and at the bottom of *all* leaflets
say:
   "AFFS is funded by membership dues, and donations.  A list
    of donors can be found at http://www.affs.org.uk/donors/";
or:
   "AFFS thanks it's donors for providing printing costs, a
    list of donors can be found at http://www.affs.org.uk/donors/";

The donors page should also be linked from the home page.  A note
at the top of the donors page should mention that listing does not
imply AFFS endorsement.

Rationale:
* Printing company names/logos on leaflets may cause confusion as
  to who "really" runs AFFS.  Remember that the target audience of
  leaflets is people that don't already know about AFFS.
* Leaflet content could never be out of date, only the donors
  page needs updating.
* An equal distribution of credit is ensured to donors.
* No policing necessary ("is company/department X a true Free
  Software company/department?")
* It makes it possible for AFFS to accept donations from any company
  since we wouldn't be giving them ad-space, and we'd mention that
  no endorsement is implied.

Does this sound like a good approach?
-- 
Ciaran O'Riordan - http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/