Building on my last post...

On one hand it's seductive and natural to look to Nokia for some sort of funding of community-led outreach. I'm actually surprised something isn't already in place along those lines, from Nokia.

But I've personally been running into wall after wall trying to find out how it can happen, which isn't surprising: I've been inside the Nokia matrix and know firsthand how big and crazy it can get. Anyway so far I'm hearing some "maybe this can happen" but a heck of a lot more "NO"s and "I don't know"s when it comes down to it.

So the question remains: how do we get funding? Maybe we should not depend on Nokia. Maybe we need to partner with other for-profit organizations and offer them service in return. Maybe a sponsor's approved logo appears prominently on flyers and posters.

I don't want to sell out, but then, I don't want to give up on grassroots community activities either. Maybe we can find balance.

Does anyone have examples of how this has worked with other organizations? Could we get, say, IBM to chip in? And should we?

One thing I would like to see from Nokia: a few N900s to offer as door prizes (drawings) at events like the upcoming Texas Linux Fest.

fwiw http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...outreach_team/ is still missing a split between problem and solution.

I'm confident I can get budget for something like this. In an ideal world we would get one invoice, pay the funding and be done from Nokia's side. The rest would be handled by the Maemo community. However, that possibility doesn't exist and this is where the problems start.

Today one community contributor asks for a "small" (for Nokia) amount of money that (for Nokia) is complicated to pay in order to make some maemo.org promotion in an event. Then what? This action doesn't scale well.

Look the request "a budget around $20,000 that should fully pay for forty, two-day shows or eighty one-day shows". Managing all those payments to all those individuals creates an overhead of bureaucracy.

Besides, who decides who are the 40-80 right actions if we get 80-160 requests? Or concurrent requests from different individuals for a same event, with budget to cover only one. We don't really want to be in the middle of these decisions. You want us to concentrate our time in other things.

But anyway, the first step is always to get the budget. Once you have it is easier to distribute it than not having money.

Money is something serious that requires some planning. If you want a marketing budget then you need a marketing plan with a budget estimation. Say, which events do you wish to cover in this semester? How many people at which cost for travel and accommodation? What marketing materials and at which cost of production and transport? What other costs to be considered?

I wouldn't expect to get 20k from anybody without doing this homework first.

All that is understood. I will do more research.

Open note to the community: if you have events you think are relevant, please post them! (I'll collect here) ie:

Examples:

Barcelona Long Weekend
Consumer Electronics Show 2010
FOSDEM 2010
Mobile World Congress 2010
Nokia Connecting People - Barcelona 2010
Maemo Summit 2010

Invitations:

FOSS Nigeria 2010 - http://fossnigeria.org/

Linuxtag 2010 (Berlin, Germany) - http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/

Akademy 2010 (Tampere, Finland) - http://akademy.kde.org/

OpenMobility conference (Zlin, Czech Republic) - http://mobility.openmoko.cz/

Community Organized:

Maemo Italian Long Weekend, March or April (tentative, somewhere in Italy (undetermined) - http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Italian_Long_Weekend

Community Suggestions:

PyCon 2010, Feb-17-2010 to Feb-25-2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA - http://us.pycon.org/2010/about/

SCALE 8x, Feb-19-2010 to Feb-21-2010, Los Angeles, CA, USA - http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale8x/

USENIX FAST '10, Feb-23-2010 to Feb-26-2010 , San Jose, California, USA - http://www.usenix.org/events/fast10/

ICT Spring 2010, Mar-15-2010 to Mar-16-2010, Luxembourg, Luxembourg - http://www.ictspring.com/

Where 2.0, Mar-30-2010 to Apr-01-2010, San Jose, California, USA - http://en.oreilly.com/where2010

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, 04/14/10 - 04/16/10, San Francisco, California, USA - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/ev...oration-summit

IT360° Conference & Expo 2010, Apr-07-2010, Toronto, Ontario, Canada - http://www.it360.ca/

Texas Linux Fest, April 10, 2010, Austin, Texas, USA - http://texaslinuxfest.org/

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Int'l (CHI), 10-15 April 2010, Atlanta, GA US - http://www.chi2010.org/

Mobile Marketing Forum APAC 2010, Apr-14-2010 to Thursday Apr-15-2010, Singapore, Singapore - http://forum.mmaglobal.com/?q=node/951

LinuxFest Northwest, 04/24/10 to 04/25/10, Bellingham, Washington, USA - http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/

NSDI '10, Apr-28-2010 to Friday Apr-30-2010, San Jose, California, USA - http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi10/


most events from this page: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Resources/Event-Calendar
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EDIT: let's try focusing on regional and larger events for the most part, especially annual. It would be nice to cover everything and everybody for dozens of local meetups, but Quim is right: probably more trouble than it's worth.

However-- I think we should also consider occasional presentations at certain local user groups. For this all we would need is flyers, devices to demo and perhaps some low-cost "swag" (mugs, tee-shirts). For flyers, I can create an estimate for a one-time bulk order, stock them centrally, and send out as needed. That creates a cost Nokia would be more open to rather than continuous request for more and more materials. And we can monitor consumption rate to see when a re-order would be required.

Similar with device giveaways. I would suggest we reserve those for large events, and limit to 3 or less. Once we have a roster of such events, quantifying this one-time cost also becomes easy.

Etc etc etc.

Just a quick query on what kind of events - I don't 'do' trade shows, but there are plenty of academic conferences that would provide interesting breeding ground (e.g. CHI) - this is interesting for a few reasons - customers who are keen on shiny things, yes, but also those who are prepared to put time and energy and their own money (grants) into making fun things happen on the device.

FYI, Community flyer update: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...818#post498818

Printing these is one expense.

I do know that a couple of years ago there was Maemo involvement with university students in Beijing, so it's not unprecedented. In fact if I remember right there may have been one in India too. But, yeah, we shouldn't limit consideration solely to trade shows and at-large developer events.

EDIT: in fact it makes sense to look at universities near Nokia locations... Stanford, Boston College, University of Helsinki, etc. Maybe even UT Dallas for me. Although I would be surprised if Maemo itself did not already have plans for that in the works...

EDIT 2: it would be nice to see first a list of 3rd-party events Nokia already has official plans for. If nothing else we need to avoid duplication of effort.

I would love to be involved in this. Unfortunately, I live in the arse end of nowhere, where no-one ever held a conference or meet-up. And I know nothing about development. But I'm following with interest!

Trust me, Kathy, since you volunteered you'll get put to work on SOMEthing!

I just realised the profanity filter is American in choice of language. The most I've managed in terms of 'outreach' is telling anyone stupid enough to ask how wonderful the device is. Just wait till I get past May and get really involved.

Be interesting to know.

As far as academic stuff is concerned, I've already managed to plug it in one paper, with another in the works, and if I can get my little chubby fingers (oh yes, and my brain) to work properly I'll be able to demo something (related to the papers) with it in June at a conf...

No, no, don't thank me

But more seriously, perhaps, on the side of official things, picking some good conferences to show the thing at wouldn't be too hard.

Nokia even used to sponsor CHI, for instance, so it's not unheard of, and re-routing that through Maemo (maybe) to show the latest cool thing/hardware/software might be something.