Swag for FUDCons

[inode0]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Robert 'Bob' Jensen
<bob at fedoraunity.org> wrote:
> ... snip ...
> How much value is there in giving anything to $RANDOMEVENT attendee? Wouldn't it make
> more sense to give this money to contributors that are interested in getting something?

Hard to quantify either so this is a bit hard to answer. I've already
expressed my opinion that we get more bang for the buck by giving
certain types of swag (t-shirts being one example) to contributors but
that doesn't mean we don't get worthwhile bang for the buck at events.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. We certainly do give swag
including t-shirts to contributors now.

> We hear a lot of people say things like "I have my FUDcon shirt that I wear all the time." and
> "Oh I have the really cool case badge from X event" What about contributors that can't get to
> events? When do they get something for their work with the project? My Suggestion is to quit
> spending all the money on events, spend some on the contributors that make Fedora. order
> release shirts make them available to CLA+2 contributors let them pay the postage. Near the
> end of the release cycle dump the remaining shirts to a couple events. Give us a chance to
> promote Fedora and we will. I think contributors having the chance to get something Fedora
> related is a much bigger bang for the buck.

This is where we run into a practical problem. Events are easy
distribution points. FUDCon is one place we can hit a group of
contributors easily. How many contributors are we talking about who
fall completely outside the scope of this? 500? 1000? 5000? Who has
time to package up and ship 2000 t-shirts individually to people
regardless of who pays for it?

I'm 100% in agreement that we need to be more than mindful of
expressing gratitude to contributors for their efforts, we need to
actually find ways to do it. I would really like to see a more
systematic way of providing swag to project contributors. This I think
is a really worthwhile thing to think about ... and I'm going to go do
that now.

John