About any sponsorship policies. The most basic legal ground has already been covered in [policy proposal]: Sponsorship · Issue #110 · NixOS/foundation · GitHub, so I am going to build on top of that. Most importantly to me, the process of selecting sponsors is as important as the actual policy itself, regardless of what the latter may be. Some point I’d like to see covered in general [rationale in brackets]:
- The marketing team and the event organization team are mainly responsible for finding adequate sponsors. They may delegate that task.
- Sponsorship candidates must be published two weeks before the sponsorship going live (i.e. start of the event) for community consideration.
- The event organization team, the marketing team, the Foundation board and maybe also the moderation team are allowed to reject any sponsor each. [I have an obvious conflict of interest about the moderation bit, but also if things go south this *is* a lot of work so we kinda do have stakes in this]
- Sponsorship of a company, by design, includes advertising for that company. Therefore, donations by a company (which are not tied to publicity) are a different topic of discussion and out of scope. [This is especially for the “let’s just take their money” camp. I know many people who would be fine with getting donations from companies like Anduril as long as it does not cause any dependencies or conflicts of interests, but would not be comfortable with publicly advertising for such a company]
- Companies that are heavily or primarily involved in military, defense, intelligence or weapons manufacturing are not allowed to become a sponsor. [This is not a moral judgement on the companies themselves, just a reflection of the fact that a significant part of the community is not comfortable with advertising for them.]
- No matter what, Anduril is out as a sponsor [Every rule has a story, I guess]
- There are not additional blanket topic-specific restrictions for sponsorships for now. Sponsors may be rejected due to community feedback, and if necessary, more rules may be introduced. [Surveillance capitalism and for example Google have come up a couple of times in the discussion, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s rather focus on preparing ourselves for that day by building robust processes instead of trying to cover all possible rules right now.]
- To protect the overall community, events that fail to abide by these rules and processes cannot call themselves official, and must adapt their branding accordingly.