Well we came into this a bit late. Missed getting the kit and had about a week to do this. So time and manpower was, and still is a bit limited. We are just starting up and do not have a large membership or dues etc. The economy in Michigan/Detroit MI is severely down. I assume that is why we were the only one in Michigan to have an event. And other local computer groups I approached did not join in. (many which I am also a member). Our group is all volunteer. It was the effort of two people to get this done. A few others helped a little as the event got closer. We have all of these goals you mentioned. My idea was to keep it free and not charge but ask for donations. That did not work. We will start earlier next year and hope to have a lot of these points covered. Growing membership, getting sponsors and local support. It would be nice to have a budget to set :-) thanks mike bader On 9/20/2012 1:30 AM, Frederic Muller - DFI wrote:
Dear all,
I'm forwarding an email I received to the group as it specifically asks about what others do:
[quote] We are debriefing and planning for next year. We did not charge for admission, food, drinks, media or anything. We lost our shirt :-) I know computer people are cheap. But we can't afford this kind of loss. We asked for donations, it was pitiful.
What do other groups do? [/quote]
While this is covered in the SFD StartUp guide here [1] and talks about all the options maybe some of us can extend on the topic. In Beijing SFD events tend to be larger than most other things we organize and therefore we seek sponsorship from existing FOSS companies present in our area. We are lucky enough to have enough of them, even if some are rather cheap and would never give money to any other events than their own. One of the important aspect of this is to build relationships over time and not only contacting them for money. Your group has probably other events where it is worth inviting them to participate and/or to present what they are doing. Likewise you can also forward job offers when they have some, thus helping both parties.
For smaller events we tend to ask our own members for funding. Again this is split into two different solution, where in both cases as mentioned in the StartGuide we set a budget first. In both cases you publish the budget and decide either to let people finance as they wish (some with give $100 while others nothing) or split the cost among the participants (you usually need to either do RSVP or "guesstimate" how many people will attend).
Of course as I mentioned previously on this mailing list you can always find local sponsors who are not in the tech industry but who will happily support you because they are interested in your demographics. You just need to highlight those to them, look like "puss in boots" when asking and usually that does the trick.
So if you have similar or different experiences please go ahead and share them with us. We could definitely extend the StartGuide and make it more like a case study section on this topic.
Thanks.
Fred
[1] http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide#Budgeting
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