potential sponsors? (and some other stuff)

[Douglas Whitfield]

Sponsorship has been a hot topic on Twitter, but I thought it might be
better to discuss in more than 140 char. What companies with money
might be interested in sponsoring an event on openness in MKE? The
main possibilities I've come up with are:

Activists
Libraries
Educational institutions
FOSS companies

To my knowledge, there are no FOSS companies in Wisconsin and the
other options are places without money. I'm not at all opposed to
corporate sponsorship. I'm even fine selling some sort of keynote.
This is clearly influenced by *Camp, but it doesn't have "camp" in the
name.

Now, I do know that the Radio Counsel in Madison just got a big grant,
but I doubt they'd be interested in an event in Milwaukee. I could
potentially see a social media group or PR group interested in
sponsorship, but I don't think that'd be an easy pitch.

Are there big potential customers of Red Hat, Sun, etc? I feel like
it would be easier to get sponsorship in Chicago, but it might be
possible to get some big FOSS players involved. The problem with FOSS
players being sponsors is scaring off non-techies. I feel like a
company like Dell would be cautious with Microsoft ties. A lot of
people seem to think that Open Everything means Nothing Closed and I'm
sure all of you are aware that's not the case. The idea is that
everything is a topic, not that everything must be open in some sort
of fanatical sense. It's hard to get people to listen long enough for
that message to get across though. I'll talk to my contact at Dell
about potential sponsorship.

----end sponsorship talk, begin finances talk---

Does anyone know how much it would cost to get a couple rooms at
Bucketworks from 10-5 on a Saturday? Do we think 1-7 is a better
time? People seemed to have trouble getting there on time in
Madison. If we did it 1-7 we wouldn't have to feed them a meal at
all. We could get away with just snacks. Right now I'm assuming 40
people and hoping to get non-BarCamp types like we did for the event
in Madison. We successfully added Kaitlin to the *Camp posse, I
think. That's probably the only legitimate add we got, but there's no
telling what the shock waves of the event are like...until the next
big Madison event of any sort.

Oh, and I tossed out the idea of having a SustainabilityCamp like they
did in Toronto. I think Alnisa's GreenCamp name is much better (um,
140 char, for realz). This is not something I want to be in charge
of, but I wouldn't mind helping out or talking to potential leads (I
don't want to go on wild goose chases like I am doing for Open
Everything Milwaukee).

Thanks all for joining!

[Dan Knauss]

At least try hitting the City of Milwaukee and Journal Sentinel for
sponsorship. The City has a 30-40 person IT staff whose 2007 total pay
and overtime was nearly $3 Million. They have a new CIO who instigated
the text messaging alerts for snow emergencies. A good chunk of the
City IT infrastructure is Linux based. You should be able to get MPD
on board; Chief Flynn is hiring and shaking things up to be
Intelligence and IT driven--and also more involved with the public.
MPD is on youtube and twitter; there are several City twitter
accounts, more to come and from the County too I think.

As for open source companies, the Joomla Milwaukee Users group is off
a big start thanks to the sponsorship of some suburban Milwaukee and
Chicago based firms. Connections from there go the the Chicago/
Evanston CMS Expo people. I see more interaction there and on other
levels between Joomla, Drupal and some other big open source projects.
Acquia was a sponsor for the recent DC tcamp09.

I was corresponding the other day with Matt Butcher who is a fairly
well-known Drupal guy working with Palantir in Chicago. Also a
philosophy grad student at Loyola working on ethics and IT, esp. as it
pertains to government. Why can't Milwaukee draw in some Chicago
people? Chicago is also home to the Everyblock guys, who are part of
the IGOTF.

I should check if DIYcity.org has an active Chicago group--they
should.

[Douglas A. Whitfield]

Thanks Dan!  The only problem I see with all of this is the emphasis on the technical.  I suppose we've got to start somewhere though.  I'm not going to be able to do much with this as far as contacting people until after the event in Madison (April 18th).  What do people think as a reasonable date in thinking about getting this thing pulled together?

[Dan Knauss]

A Fall date seems doable.
 
I think the technical stuff can be avoided with gov and media people as they're often much more interested in concepts and policy.

 

Dan Knauss

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/danknauss
New Local Media :: www.newlocalmedia.com
Twitter: @newlocalmedia

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