LoCo donations idea

[Richard A. Johnson]

OK, let me clear a couple myths I have seen thus far:

 * Canonical/Ubuntu Foundation can accept donations. How do I know? I know 
people who have donated, and at one point, there used to be a page on 
ubuntu.com that listed donations (1.5 to 2 years ago I believe).
 * Not all LoCos need money. This is true in a lot of cases, but at the same 
time, I know the Ubuntu Chicago Team cannot expect Canonical to send us 
1,000+ CDs for each of our events here. So having money definitely helps. I 
have paid $500 for 1,000 custom cut CDs, sure I could have paid $350 for some 
sloppy ones.

Why would I need 1,000 CDs for an event? Easy, we are expecting 300 Gutsy CDs, 
those will be gone in less than 15 minutes. At UIC this year, we had over 
1,000 CDs, and nobody left with one in the group. We have 10 large college 
campuses in the area that hold all types of computer events, some are even MS 
oriented, and yet we can still push 250 to 500 CDs at these events, and then 
get people emailing the list and joining us for our events. So it is nice to 
have money for this. I have created a CD with my own money and a few bucks 
from some people here or there in order to fund anything the group may have. 
So far it has worked, but there are teams where this may not work. Look at 
the German team, they are insanely huge and insanely busy (and insane! :). 
They needed money in order to help control their events. I have been to 
events where you can see where a team w/o any funds attempted to run a booth. 
Here is what I observed:

 * Poorly looking displays
 * Poorly printed flyers
 * Computers that look like they been sitting on the floor at grandmas who has 
30 cats and smokes 8 packs a day
 * No uniformity at all.

At every event I have been to, Fedora and SUSE do it right, actually, 
Foresight has stepped it up a notch. It takes money to run a decent booth. 
People go to a show, they want to go home with swag, whether it is a shirt, 
stickers, hats, pens, you name it, that costs money. Swag is a great 
advertising tool, you can ask Melissa (elkbuntu) about that. I remember her 
putting together gift bags in the past that was a huge success. This all 
costs money.

I have sat back now for 2 years as a part of the LoCo communities and was on 
the same side as the "teams don't need money". After running one or two shows 
w/o Canonical support, Ubuntu started to get laughed at. We sat there like 
deer in a headlight wondering wth just happened. It was after this, I decided 
to take a couple of hundred dollars and put it in a very high interest 
bearing CD that I could operate like a checking account. This way, if 
Canonical doesn't step up, which I stopped expecting them to in the past 
year, I can still be covered. Right now, I get all kinds of requests for CDs, 
so I put in my order, even if it is 50 to 100 CDs, and it gets denied. I feel 
I have warn out my welcome that way. One thing I am planning on doing is 
getting a semi-professional rig where I can duplicate CDs quickly as well as 
either paint an image on or lightscribe an image on.

As it stands, the Chicago team doesn't have anything to make the booth look 
attractive. A couple of events we were grateful that the event coordinators 
decorated the booths ahead of time.

I just seen that Leo said "not accept any money but instead let the sponsors 
pay for the expenses directly to the providers." I can say this as a business 
owner, I am not going to pay your expenses w/o any cut back, and either are 
99% of the other business. They want to donate the money. Why? Because they 
get it back in taxes at the end of the year. OK, say I do offer to pay $1000 
for your venue, and hardly anyone shows up. I don't care how many of my 
banners you posted, it reaching only 25 eyes doesn't hook the books and 
remove the red marks for contributing my cash. Now, I used this case as a 
basis of what teams in the US would face, as that is the business I am most 
familiar with, or at least I try to act like that :)

We can't blame Canonical, we can't point fingers at them, nor can we always 
trust or expect them to do what we want. Remember, Ubuntu is community run, 
it is ours, not Canonicals, so it is up to us to do the promotion. I don't 
know about you, but being in the marketing field, I haven't seen any 
marketing (successful at least) from Canonical, only from the LoCo teams. Now 
some people see this as a reason for Canonical to care, and truthfully I 
think they should. We do a ton of marketing for them. But remember, at the 
same time we are receiving and have special access to what I consider the 
greatest innovation in many years. It is Ubuntu (well Kubuntu for me) and all 
of you that has made me stick with a distro as faithfully as I have. I have 
had offers to go elsewhere, but I just don't feel, nor see, the love that I 
do with all of you. Maybe this biases my views, and only you can probably see 
that.

OK, I have rambled on, switched tangents, and drink 2 beers during this email, 
so I will give up the microphone now and pass it on, otherwise my karaoke may 
start to bring us all down :)

-- 
Richard A. Johnson
nixternal at ubuntu.com
GPG Key: 0x2E2C0124
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