Hi all,
Just wanted to braindump some news & notes about sponsorship.
1. First, today we've gained one new Bronze Stylus sponsor, icons8.com. Yay!
2. A second sponsor is in the works, we're just waiting on Conservancy for processing, and should be annnounceable soon.
3. I have sent out renewal reminders to our current sponsors that have hit their expiration date. I figure we should give them a week to reply before retiring their entries from the sponsor page.
4. Should we think about increasing our Bronze sponsorship level?
Today SFC told me that they don't like to bother invoicing amounts below $1000, which makes things a bit difficult if our Bronze sponsors want invoices. So moving Bronze to $1000 may make sense just for accounting purposes.
5. Is it time to add a Diamond level?
When we set up the sponsorship levels, we originally included a Diamond level, but were not sure what amount it should be and decided we'd leave it out and revisit when it seemed plausible that we might get one. Given that we have two platinum sponsors currently, it seems plausible now. What do others think?
6. Do we want to increase other sponsorship levels?
I'm guessing no, but if the board thinks we should this might be a good time to do so. We may want to do some TBD grandfathering of existing sponsors.
7. In order to improve our tracking of sponsors a little, I've added a private "Financial" sub-group to inkscape-board in gitlab, with a "sponsors" project under it:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape-board/financial/sponsors/issues
I figure we can use the issues tracker with each issue used for a separate sponsor. I'm treating the issue description as a semi-structured data record in YAML format, in case some day we want to tack on tools or integrate with other stuff. For now though it'll just be maintained manually, but this should hopefully permit >1 bus factor on sponsor management.
Since Financial is a sub-group of the board, it is possible to add other highly trusted but non-board people to only this group. I've added Maren since due to her heavy involvement in sponsors and other financial matters in the past.
8. I have also added a Legal sub-group to inkscape-board, with a project for focusing on branding issues like trademark infringement investigations. This is also a private group, so only visible to board members plus trusted non-board people. I've added Pamela Chestek and Denver Gingerich, who are Conservancy lawyers that have worked with us on some of these issues in the past.
Bryce