[LGM] 2011/2012

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

a.l.e wrote:
> the other issue i wanted to raise was: in my eyes we are spending too
> much time and energy to raise little money (basically: i have the
> feeling that if the people who are involved in raising the money would
> put the costs of their hours in the LGM bank account, we would probably
> have as much money as gets raised by their effort... it's probably not
> 100% correct, but i hope you get the idea...).
> (and i'm excluding the few bigger sponsors which give us a substantial
> amount of money with little effort from our part)

The big sponsors are the ones that take effort.

>> Now, ask yourself, who is going to put time into raising funds for
>> people who are this ungrateful?
> 
> sorry, i got lost. who is ungrateful to whom? the Gimp folks to you as a
> LGM 1 organizer?
> the Gimp folks to the last LGM? the last LGM to the Gimp folks?

In general, the people who feel like getting reimbursed is a reward for
their work, or complain about paying small amounts of money during the
conference, or who underappreciate the work involved in fundraising.

> however, one idea which i extract from your sentences above (and we
> already discussed with louis): should we help (and sollecit) the
> projects to raise their own money for funding the traveling to the LGM?
> that would simplify many things for us...

Certainly there is an expectation of donors to the GIMP that the money
be spent on the betterment of the project - and that means paying for
developers to travel to conferences etc. So I would say yes, ask
projects to pitch in if they have the means.

> i may be wrong, but my perception is that almost no money is involved in
> other tasks than refunding traveling costs. (or: not a significant
> amount of money)

In the first LGM, I paid accommodation for some people, we had that nice
meal on Friday evening, and we had some printing costs. Other than that,
most of the costs are travel, you're right. I have put on a nice
conference for 70 - 100 people with food one evening and lunch every day
for about €7K.

> personally, i still prefer to first check what we want to do, and then
> see who can do it, how much money it will cost and how we can raise
> it... but we can talk about money first, if you (plural) prefer.

If you're going to be involved in organising the next LGM, then you get
to decide :)

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary at gnome.org