Earlier today, I posted to the Twisted mail list and to our Labs blog about the deadline for the Founding Sponsors (individuals and companies/organizations) for the Twisted Software Foundation, so I thought now would be a good time to give a quick status report :-)
Things are going well. We're still working with 4 major donors (some of whom are surprising!), with an additional 3 outliers who may or may not donate. We're hoping to have all that confirmed and settled within the next two weeks. For the full list of current sponsors, please see the Founding Sponsors page.
So what does all this mean? It means that Twisted has a continually-increasing chance of meeting your needs and exceeding your expectations :-)
Sponsors will have access to a private email list that is managed by the TSF, and this will be the primary forum where desired features and issues to be addressed will be discussed. The donations help us address resource issues and the collective voice of the sponsors will help provide a focus on important topics.
Not only do the current sponsors have their logos+links on the front page, but Founding Sponsors also get this on a dedicated page on the Twisted site in perpetuity. We've got some amazing Google Juice (search), so this works out well for all. We've also been approached by sponsors who are using it as a means of recruiting Python and Twisted talent in their shops. There are all sorts of creative ways that this can be of benefit :-)
If you haven't stopped by the TSF pages, give them a look and see if it's something you or your organization could be interested in.
Update: Thanks to feedback from Grig Gheorghiu, we now have two domains that direct to the TSF page:
Be aware that the DNS for those may still be propagating when you click on them :-)
7 comments:
Hi, Duncan
Is there a page anywhere describing the requirements for becoming a sponsor? If there is, it's not obvious (maybe on purpose?) :-)
Thanks!
Grig
Grig,
That's an interesting question! We hadn't thought about that... I guess because *anyone* can (and should!) become a sponsor. As long as they donate, that is :-)
So I'm very curious as to what caused you to ask this question. And/or your views on requirements (as they may be different than ours). Or what requirements we *should* have...
I look forward to hearing your thoughts :-)
Duncan,
I was just thinking that for becoming a PyCon sponsor there are certain requirements in terms of the sponsorship level -- i.e. X dollars for silver-level which gets you this level of exposure vs. Y dollars for gold-level which gets you that level of exposure.
Also, I was looking for the mechanism of becoming a sponsor -- send an email to where? Or just post a comment on this blog? Things like that.
I guess my main point is that a FAQ page on becoming a TSF sponsor would help. And the reason why I ask is that I (or the company I work for) might be interested in becoming a sponsor.
Grig
Wow, I'm so glad you asked: we do have that information available, but it sounds like it's not visible/clear/obvious enough.
The details on sponsorship (everything from levels to benefits to the ways in which one can donate) are available here: Twisted Software Foundation.
We haven't addressed such things as levels of exposure, other than demarcation on the site (under the level at which one has sponsored). For instance, we aren't spending any time providing more marketing value for a Gold sponsor than a Bronze. We'd end up spending sponsor dollars on that instead of Twisted, and the large cost of marketing would quickly drain the funds.
If you want to become a sponsor, the bottom of the TSF page (linked above) has those details. For individuduals, the sponsor buttons on the front page of the Twisted site are probably sufficient. The "donate" buttons are bellow the list of sponsors. Paypal charges us per transaction; for non-profits, Google doesn't, so it will help us more if you use Google Checkout :-)
A FAQ page is a great idea. I would also be interested in hearing more from you on your experience of visiting the site (which we are trying to improve) and what we could do to make existence of the TSF page more apparent, since (I believe) that page should answer most of your questions...
Yes, that page pretty much answers all my questions. Now if only I could find it more easily :-) Maybe a tsf.org domain name that would redirect to that page? As it is, it's buried in a Trac wiki, and wikis are notoriously hard to navigate and organize....
Thanks for the pointer to the page.
Grig
Grig, great idea! Thanks :-)
I have just registered the following (though it will take the usual time for DNS propagation):
* twistedsoftwarefoundation.org/
* tsf.name
Update about the location of the "donate" buttons: we've moved them to the left of the page, since they were taking up too much room on the right.
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