[Projectleiding] Sponsor policy change proposal

[Juerd Waalboer]

Hi,

This edition is moving to more, and more visible, sponsoring. I understand that this is necessary given the unique situation we find ourselves in, with several overlapping crises and much increased costs. We can only be grateful to have found so many companies enthusiastic to support the event.

However, given the past controversy surrounding this topic, I think any such transition must be fully honest and transparent, and in one specific way, it currently is not. This point has previously been discussed on IRC, and I'll just summarize here, with specific suggestions/recommendations to synchronise policy with reality and vice versa.

It's a long mail to account for nuance and background information, but feel free to skip to the numbered suggestions at the end :)


- There are villages with a commercial name, description, or other metadata. Most specifically: the website link.

- SHA2017 had some, but significantly less, spam in village wiki pages.

- A commercial domain name, especially one that leads to a corporate website, is branding, or as many would put it: spam. When part of an email address or specific URL, it is also technical information for routing purposes, but I think we can agree that a link to the *front page* of a commercial entity, is just spam.

- Usage of such branding opportunities has always been frowned upon and actively discouraged or forbidden at these events.

- The policy at https://wiki.mch2022.org/Sponsoring clearly forbids branding through a village page: "Branding such as logos and naming will be limited to the website, booklet and other predefined places like a team presentation or the MCH2022 badge." - Although technically the wiki is also a website, "the website" generally does not refer to the wiki.

- There have already been efforts to remove branding from villages (specifically: village names and descriptions), but it is incomplete, meaning the policy as stated is not enforced.

- People who create villages on the wiki, fill out the Website URL because the field is presented, not necessarily because they want to use the village for branding. This has been confirmed by multiple village builders, including two related to sponsors.

- The website field is said to be useful for identifying villages as belonging to a company or sponsor. I think it is wholly unnecessary to identify villages as such, and we should always try to see villages as belonging to the villagers, not the organization they happen to work for.

- The villages list at https://wiki.mch2022.org/Villages is turning into a billboard with all those URLs.

- I think it normalized and widely accepted to allow promotion of non-profit organizations that share our values. The gripes only refer to for-profit spam.

- It might also make sense to continue to allow some branding in village metadata, but only for sponsors.


As such, I suggest the following changes:

1. Explicitly allow sponsors to mention their company name, and link to a commercial website, in one associated village's wiki page, by adding "Sponsors may mention their company name, and link to their company website, in one associated village's wiki page." in between the sentences "Branding such as logos..." and "Commercial branding and presence ..." at https://wiki.mch2022.org/Sponsoring - by using a new phrase instead of adding it to an existing one, this avoids extending the new permission to also allowing logos (currently no village with commercial association is using logos).

2. Remove the Website column from the table at https://wiki.mch2022.org/Villages

3. Change the names of villages that have commercial names to slightly obfuscated references (e.g. "False")

4. Add a "Sponsor village" boolean field to the infobox to make clear to the reader why we're allowing a commercial reference.

5. De-emphasize the Website field by hiding it from the infobox if it is empty.

6. De-emphasize the Website field by moving it to just above "Registered on" in the infoboxes.

7. Actively remove all for-profit branding from villages that are not associated to our sponsors.

I volunteer to do any of these things, if it should be decided that this is the correct way forward. Please let me know.
-- 
Met vriendelijke groet, // Kind regards, // Korajn salutojn,

Juerd Waalboer  <juerd at tnx.nl>
TNX