Want to sponsor but you don't know what or how? Feel free to contact contribute@opengroupware.org for further questions!

On sponsoring:
Money | Hardware (Server, Dev, Mac) | Development | Marketing

Well, first and most important of all: an improved, live and moving forward project. Sponsoring buys time for OGo contributors to work on the opensource offerings instead of being required to acquire money with non-OGo related efforts.
Besides that OGo is a website with a significant number of visitors. We can provide listing in the sponsoring section and/or post news on the frontpage. This is subject to negotiation and depends on the actual sponsoring.

Contribution of cash money is currently discouraged because OpenGroupware.org does not yet exist as an own entity. Instead you should rather "buy" something which improves OGo - like fixes to specific or arbitary bugs or enhancement requests. This is almost as easy as direct sponsoring, but is backed by a proper invoice.

Anyway, if you just to want to say 'thank you' and sponsor some arbitary amount, use Paypal ;-):

Always required for computer related work ... hardware. First of all: we don't need junk hardware! Development work requires fast and current machines.

Right now we have sufficient hardware capacities for hosting the OGo project itself (webserver, CVS server, etc) and we are running into rackspace limitations anyway.

Some OGo developers complain about noisy and slow hardware as well as about bad screens. If you have a heart, sponsor those starving developers some high quality flat displays (17 inch an up) and fast+silent machines! ;-) It will be appreciated a lot in day-to-day OGo work.
Developers also love fast and stylish laptops to be able to work for OGo whenever and whereever possible!

The most requested hardware port is OGo on MacOSX / PPC. Unfortunately gcc compilation on regular G4 machines like the iMac is extremely slow which makes porting no fun at all which in turn makes progress slow.
So in case you want to help MacOSX porting efforts, sponsoring fast Apple machines should help a *lot*. Preferred are Xserve G5 for rack installation. Minimum system would be a dual G4 which is still pretty slow for the task at hand.

One of the best ways to sponsor OpenGroupware.org is to sponsor development efforts, that is, to pay developers for their work. There is a broad range of things to sponsor, from small issues like minor bugfixes up to complete ports to new hardware or integration with other groupware clients.
The OGo project leads also manage contribution pools so that a larger feature doesn't need to be paid by a single person.

The best way to get a bug fixed is not complaining about it, but rather paying some money to get it fixed. Compared to the size of the project, OGo has very few bugs - and most of the issues listed are rather minor ones or specific to some setup and mostly necessary to improve the overall quality of the server.
All OGo bugs are tracked in public in the OGo Bugzilla: Listed Bugs.
Just for reference: of course bugs get fixed without any payment - just takes more time and may not process specific issues: Fixed Bugs.

OGo gets loads of enhancement requests of various kinds. Some are trivial things easy to implement in a day, some are more complex additions that would require major efforts. Especially the complex additions can hardly be implemented in the sparetime of the OGo developers and therefore require funding.
Like the bugs, OGo enhancement requests are tracked in the OGo Bugzilla: Enhancement Requests.

In addition to the "regular" enhancement requests, there are some larger, known projects which require significant funding. OGo project leads can also manage fund-pools so that development can start once enough sponsors could be found.
Note that often it is also quite useful to fund a project "kick-off" - that is, instead of paying for the whole project, rather fund the setup and initial design. Its much more likely that people jump in and help with an already running project instead of starting from scratch.

Some examples for projects that take more time and require funding:

Note: We also encourage developers to signal interest in the implementation of one of such tasks! Just let the OGo leads know, what amount of money you would require for a specific feature.

OpenGroupware.org staff now and then visits or wants to visit tradeshows, fairs or developer conventions, for example the FOSDEM 2004.

What we need on this front are all kinds of marketing materials - for example OGo posters, t-shirts, flyers etc. Things like this are not necessarily expensive, yet by giving out information on fairs we can increase the visibility of the project leading to even more contributors and a growing user base.

In addition we of course appreciate sponsoring of booths and of travel and overnight expenses - especially in case of events taking place outside of Germany!

... please let us know if you would like to sponsor the OpenGroupware.org project - write mail to contribute@opengroupware.org!