Hi, Before going down to business, a personal message from moi: in the last week there has been a number of IRC discussions about our current fundraising situation. Every now and again somebody will refer to myself as a "pessimist". I would like to ask for people to think twice before doing so. First, because it makes me *furious*. FURIOUS. I am by no means a pessimist, I have been working on this for months and, in the face of overwhelming odds I keep trying. That, my friends, speaks of being truly an optimistic. But the part that makes me want to punch anybody calling me a pessimist (yes, it is that bad) is that you're recurring to name-calling instead of bringing anything of substance to our budget debate. I am a scientist by training, you can't discount my extrapolations just by trying to bring out any flaws you perceive on my personality. I work towards a DebConf of financial largess and unconstrained productivity. I just don't see that happening at this point. People from past years are not putting forward *numbers* to back up their claims and I don't buy them. They just cite anecdotal evidence without taking the time to analyze how the figures from past years differ from this DebConf (which I have done), the time remaining for fundraising and our available pool of potential leads. But foremost, if you're going to call me a pessimist again. Stop. Think. And just don't. I'd more than appreciate it.
Now that we can put all that "Pablo is a pessimist' bullshit behind us, here is our current state of affairs at my end (I'll send exact fundraising numbers tomorrow before the meeting): * As of today, we have contacted 125 leads. At least 60% of which are new potential sponsors without strong ties to the project, but we have pursued them anyway because we have a larger team and we hope for the best. We would of course had preferred pursuing better leads, but we exhausted the good ones we had pretty early on the year. * We have two new members in the fundraising team this week which have done quite a bit of cold calling: Hector Oron and Andrew Lee. I have been very impressed with their work, and I'm hoping it will bear fruit soon. * Zack has been active in fundraising for a few weeks now and he has some of the most exciting leads we have open at the moment. * Brian Gupta got a new bronze sponsor by looking himself at the mirror and writing us a check. He rules :-) * Sledge has been discussing with at least two potential leads that seem very close to close and that might bring two new bronze sponsors, but hopefully he can say more. * I'm closer to close (discussing numbers and benefits) with two potential leads (one brought by Clint) that might end up in $2,500 total. There are at least two more which might total around $5,000. And I got some new info about the state of affairs of two past sponsors that have been unresponsive so far, but that might change and between the two of them we can get another $5,000. (that's all I have hopes at my end in the next 10 days or so). So you know how much we're exhausting all options, today I was looking at a business card I got once from a guy I was chatting on the train two years ago. (I didn't contacted him as his company is no more.) * People have been very forthcoming with lists of very general leads, I have been going through some of them and I'm hoping we can divide them up because they are at least 100+ * I realized not everybody doing fundraising is subscribed to debconf-sponsors-t...@lists.debconf.org so I'm trying to improve that so we can use that channel for discussions (as not everybody is on IRC). * The time might be good to start a separate campaign to fund our travel sponsorships, I'll send a proposal in a separate e-mail for discussion. * I'll collate our current numbers before the meeting and send them by e-mail, but I wanted to give Zack, Sledge, Hector, Clint and Andrew a chance to share with us whether they expect their leads to bear any fruit in the next few weeks (and how money that'll mean for DebConf). As you guys see above, these are all wild guesses but you have been talking to your leads so we respect your opinions very much. Thanks and sorry for the rant at the beginning, I really needed to take it out of my system :-S Pablo _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
