So I spend some time last week pumping information out of a board member of the Doc. Foundation. In general, they have a lot of individual sponsors, and then also corporations that are willing to kick in funds as needed. They get a lot of individual sponsors from their download page ask. A couple things he mentioned was making sure to set an initial value of something like $5, where if you leave it open ended people wonder "can I contribute enough to make a difference" and then don't contribute because what they could easily afford they don't throw in.

One thing that they've done similar to us is encourage other people to set up crowdfunding of development features. They've left it even more open ended than ours, but it seems they're roughly of the same mind as us, nice to get that feedback.

For conferences and hackfests they're mostly getting bids from local organizing committees that are in charge of fund raising for that event. I'm not sure how that'd work for us, but it could be something to try if we wanted to try and create something decoupled from something like LGM. I know that conferences like GUADEC have been partially funded by local tourism or promotion grants, which might be something we could tap into with a local organizing committee.

Another thing that he pointed out is how the D community is setting up their conferences:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2083649206/the-d-programming-language-conference-2013-0

Not sure that we could sell a bunch of $5K items, but it might be a way to view the budget and what one would get. I love the idea of selling the conference T-shirts to non-attendees as it's something that I think we can do well (Inkscape users make cool designs I'd want on a T-shirt) and it lowers the cost of printing if we increase the numbers.

Ted

On Fri, 2014-10-17 at 10:52 +0200, Tavmjong Bah wrote:

I am thinking it might be good to look at other projects for ideas on
how they handle various issues in raising money. Here are some  links
for OpenOffice:

Good discussions:

	http://planet.documentfoundation.org/

(Why can planet.inkscape.org be like this?)

Donation page:

	http://donate.libreoffice.org/

Supporters page:

	https://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/

Tav