[Villages] [Projectleiding] Sponsor policy change proposal

[MCH Sponsor Team]

Hi Juerd,


Thanks for your elaborate email. For me, the primary reason of keeping the URLs is that it’s the only current way of identifying which sponsor belongs to which village. That’s important because pagoda tents are reserved for sponsors outside of the moebelhaus shop, but tables, chairs, and extra tents were ordered via moebelhaus.

Team:Villages needs an overview for e.g. placing the villages, and we did not have an easy way of doing that this year. It’ll be a lesson learnt for next edition. Maybe an extra field during village registration can ask for a sponsor affiliation, or maybe the whole situation can be fixed by getting sponsors to order their tents via moebelhaus too, and putting a deadline in place.

In any case, none of the above fixes are appropriate at this time, because we’re so close to the event. Your suggestion of simply hiding the URLs in the village overview sounds okay to me, if Team:Villages (CC) agrees. If they agree, I’d gladly make use of your help to do it.

Adding a public marker for a village saying it’s related to a sponsor contradicts the philosophy of making them equal to other visitors: the same rights, and no special treatment.

The renaming of sponsor villages to not contain branded names is already ongoing. Renaming non-sponsor villages with branded content is something that I think we should not do, and instead make Team:Villages aware of them so they can contact them or change it.

If you’d like to discuss any of this in more detail, you can reach me on +31655168655. Please be mindful though that there’s a lot going on right now, and everyone is already stretched thin on other important things to do.



Met vriendelijke groet / Kind regards,

Tom Clement (Halcyon)
Team Projectleiding & Sponsoring MCH2022
tom at mch2022.org <mailto:tom at mch2022.org> | www.mch2022.org <http://www.mch2022.org/>



> On 11 Jul 2022, at 12:24, Juerd Waalboer <juerd at tnx.nl> wrote:
> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Projectleiding mailing list
> Projectleiding at lists.ifcat.org
> https://lists.ifcat.org/mailman/listinfo/projectleiding


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mch2022.org/pipermail/villages/attachments/20220711/41c368e4/attachment.html>