[CLUE-Admin] Fund raising comments

[David Anselmi]

Lynn Danielson wrote:
> John Kennedy wrote:

[...]

> Yeah.  Somewhere I started to develop a negative attitude
> about the auction.  I came away from it with a few nice
> items which I got far cheaper than I should have.  And I
> lost out in the silent auction to last minute bids that I
> would have happily bid up.  So, I'm feeling both guilty
> and frustrated.

Hmmm...  Would you donate enough to make your buys more reasonable?  I 
don't know that I spent less than I should have, but I like what I got 
so I'm thinking of showing my gratitude (or at least a little of it ;-)

It occurred to me that our group is pretty cheap overall.  Not that 
that's bad, but Open Source selects for that a little.  It occurred to 
me (too late) that this was the wrong group for an auction.  Ah well.

I'm a little skeptical of the usefulness of future auctions.  I 
suggested to Jeff that we do a swap meet and charge admission/tables, 
but thinking about it that is likely to be small scale too.  Large scale 
gets into something like CLIQ (speakers like Maddog are more attractive 
than buying stuff).  But the last CLIQ wasn't so successful either and 
the economy, and there's a war on (well, not to be too pessimistic).  So 
I don't know.

So what else could we do?  Charge dues or admissions?  Pros and cons. 
Don't know what I think.

Sell concessions?  I don't spend money on that stuff, but it seems to be 
a hit at the ballgames.  If everyone spends a buck or two, it would help.

Raffle?  Again, a buck or two...

Corporate donation?  Now we're talking!  Anyone know a good salesman? 
The XP group (nothing to do with MS) gets about a dozen pizzas donated, 
for the public thanks they give at the meeting.  I don't know how to 
make this happen, but maybe someone else does.

How's this?  Some companies benefit from Open Source, even when it isn't 
a corporate standard.  If there's a project that obviously saves a grand 
or so, maybe the company would donate 10% of the savings to say thanks. 
  Guess it might help if we were a non-profit.

Would we be able to sell our time to someone?  Not sure how that would 
fly, probably need a good bit of luck to be in the right place at the 
right time.  But some things, like pulling cable, aren't too hard. 
Heck, we couldn't do a worse job than the guys who wired my old office.

Ok, I'm out of ideas.

Dave