[CREATE] Pitching a community-funded conference

[Dave Neary]

Hi guys,

I've had little luck with sponsorship this year, and I know that the
peopel I've asked have all said the same thing - "there are so many
conferences, we just don't get why this one is important to our business".

I would like to propose that we go straight to the community for funds.

Graphics applications rank among the most desired applications on Linux
- PhotoShop, Illustrator, AutoCAD, DreamWeaver and Visio are the top 5
missing applications on Linux according to a Linux Foundation survey.
And yet there's no corporate money being spent improving the free
software apps out there. The investment from Google and others is going
into making commercial apps on Windows work better on Linux.

What we need to do is publicise the Create project, publicise the
concrete results we've achieved out of the last 2 LGMs (XCF2, improved
drag & drop between graphics apps, shared swatches, other shared
resources, SIOX integration into Blender, ...). The list is pretty long.
Above all, we've achieved a cohesion across different projects which
will benefit us all moving forward.

And then we say that we're short money for the conference, and we ask
for donations. I can have a Paypal account set up (I suggest asking the
GNOME Foundation again to set up a specific account for us), and we can
all spread the news on our various project websites, and throughout the
web. I'm sure we'll raise over $10,000, perhaps much more.

This will also be a data point for companies representing the interest
in free software graphics apps on Linux.

What do ye think? Should we go for it?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary at free.fr
Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45
Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13