[foundation-board] Conference call sponsorship?

Mon May 31 18:00:01 UTC 2010

Hi Jordan,

I wonder whether you might possibly be able to speak to your contacts
at BT's open source wing to see if there's any possibility of in-kind
sponsorship of conference call facilities? (See below for brief
background on this.)

The other option is to speak to Cisco -- who do very serious
conference call technology, but I'm not sure about whether they
actually provide conference call services (I suspect not?).

Does anyone have any other cunning ideas about who might sponsor
conference call facilities? I think in-kind sponsorship would be
preferable to providing cash -- as I suspect we'll actually be
clocking up quite big bills. E.g. at a minimum: 10 groups x 10
participants x 12 meetings per year x 60 minutes x £0.10 a minute =
£7200. I can quite easily imagine this doubling!

All the best,

Jonathan

Background:

One of the things that will be critical for the growth of the Open
Knowledge Foundation's Working Groups in the next few years is having
regular (i.e. monthly or more) conference calls with working group
members -- who are scattered all over the globe.

We have found (the hard way!) that there are limits to the number of
callers on Skype -- and hence we are fairly urgently in need of robust
and scalable conference call facilities to enable us to continue and
expand our activities.

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg