This resulted in someone emailing the admin address to ask about sponsoring Flock. That’s reasonable from an outside perspective, but it’s not what we intended. (The Flock website lists the correct address).
I was going to update the text, but I think there’s a broader question to address. I’m starting this discussion at the Council because I think it’s a question for us to decide at a high level and then we can figure out the specific implementation.
Do we want to
Continue to have a general solicitation for donation/sponsorship
I think we should go with the second option. We can’t just take (nor do we want) any arbitrary form of donation/sponsorship, so we should be clear about what avenues for sponsorship are available.
For example, the site could read (pretend there are links here)
One additional option we have had in the past (and likely why that was pointed to admin@ there) is to donate server / datacenter resources. We have a number of places that provide us with servers and co-location in return for their logo on the sponsor pages. This doesn’t really happen much anymore, but we haven’t been looking for it. Also, we often got “I have this old 486 you can use…” types of things.
I’m not sure we want to advertise this anymore, but thats the history. Given that amazon is sponsoring us we can (and do) have things there in other regions, so diversity isn’t a big problem anymore.
Yeah, that’s one of my unspoken questions. Do we really want people approaching us with random offers of hardware? It seems like the answer in 2023 is “no. We will ask for specific things when we need them”.
And for this one, I feel it is better achieved through conversations with a strategic partner than a wide-open email alias for someone who just happens to have next-gen hardware lying around that they don’t know what to do with.
So, since this website is getting replaced with F38, does that mean we need this sponsor page on the new website? And if so, is there anything on that page that need to be changed?
I think it would be good to include it in the new site with the existing content. We may want to revisit the content more generally at some point, but that’s a low-priority task that won’t block replacing it.
Sorry, another sort of drive-by comment - but coming from a simple user’s perspective, the first thing that came to mind with “Sponsor Fedora” was a monetary donation (e.g. like donations to the Document Foundation for LibreOffice)
I’m only mentioning something because it seemed like the discussion was focusing on either company sponsorship of events, or donations of objects, and was thinking some folks who want to contribute but can’t do either of those might look for the “do something good with my money” avenue?
In the short-term, I don’t think there is an easy answer to this question, although the sentiment is definitely supported. I think the action I would rather encourage in the interim is thinking of important upstream communities that Fedora packages and delivers. The GNOME Foundation is an easy one off the top of my head, but there are certainly others, and not all of them are about desktop environments. I think encouraging one-off contributions to our upstream communities is a better sentiment.
At least right now, I am focused on trying to get our sponsorships figured out for Flock, which would be larger dollar amounts so we can hopefully wrangle more travel sponsorship and funding for bringing people there who need it. Once we get through Flock, perhaps we can revisit something like this, or perhaps even use our clout to be better about driving contributor goodwill to our important upstreams. For example, Microsoft has a FOSS Fund where employees vote every month or few months on FOSS projects to send donations. Perhaps we could do something like that for Fedora one day, but it will take us time to both be able to organize something like that and figure out how the financial piece works.
