Corporate Sponsorship RFC

[Matt Domsch]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 06:41:23PM -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> I'd like to find some additional sponsors for some of the projects we 
> are working on in Infrastructure and I feel Fedora is at the point where 
> a sponsorship framework is warranted.  This policy would be used by the 
> Infrastructure team to negotiate with potential sponsors.  I want to 
> offer a couple of options to be worked out between Fedora and the 
> Sponsor and each offering should be simple and straight forward.  Below 
> is a list of some options I'd like to formalize on the wiki.  Please 
> comment or provide additional ideas.

I'm all for additional sponsorship.  I think there are lots of needs
which can be met through developing new sponsors, and enhancing
existing ones.

 
> 1) A sponsorship page.  Those who offer bandwidth, hosting or machines 
> get to place an icon on a page on the wiki.

Indeed, easy.
 
> 2) Localized sponsorship.  Right now at the bottom of the wiki you'll 
> notice a "powered by dell" logo.  We could fairly easily devise a way to 
> add icons to various parts of our website.  For example, if a user 
> happens to hit the website in a japanese colo, they would see a 
> "services provided by" next to the dell logo.  There's a few ways to get 
> fancy with this but still make it compelling to contribute resources for 
> potential sponsors.  This is very analogous to the way our mirrors work 
> now: 
> http://fedora.mirror.facebook.com/linux/releases/7/Everything/i386/os/ 
> (for example)

One of the things I intentionally did with MirrorManager and the
publiclist web pages is to let each Site (company, organization) have
their own URL listed on the pages, in addition to the URL of the
mirror server.  That way, those volunteers and their organizations get
credit all the time for what they contribute, in a clear fashion.

Some of the things we're needing (storage, off-site backups (so more
storage), DIDs for the asterisk setup, colo space) don't directly lend
themselves to such blatent recognition though.  Web tool front ends
can, certainly.

 
> 3) White paper.  This one is my favorite.

Yeah, this is great.  Fundamentally, it's how many magazines pay for
themselves too.  A company "sponsors" an article to be written that
includes their product mention, and that sponsorship also pays for
another pure-technical article with no direct mention.

Sponsorship usually comes from a company's advertising budget, so
they're looking for eyeballs.  Where can we present impressions?
- anaconda screens while installing packages
- firstboot
- web browser default page
- our web sites
- a text file on the root of the CD/DVD "SPONSORS"
  "This Fedora release brought to you by..."
- Download redirectors (ala sourceforge)
...
- "Fedora Recommends ..." taglines?  It has the added benefit of not
  appearing like an advertisement.  :-)

I like Mike's thought of being context-sensitive.  So users from Japan
might see recognition for sponsors from that geography, if they're
geographically constrained as such.  The big companies we might hit up
are global in nature though, so need to allow for global recognition
too.

that's enough rambling for one night...
-Matt