OWASP Hartford Sponsorship

OWASP is an open source organization. While our activities are free for all, we can use your help to make our activities better. We are open to any sponsorship ideas that you may have. This are some simple ways in which you can help us:

Commercial Sponsorship
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 * OWASP Hartford chapter holds a conference usually once a year and user group meetings on a monthly basis.

We encourage consulting firms, software vendors and industry analyst firms to sponsor our conferences and help pay for such expenses such as refreshments, photography, video etc. The conferences are not commercial and the cost goes directly to cover expenses. Actually we just split the bills between the sponsors, but not more than $500 for each sponsor.

Past sponsors include Oracle, Microsoft, Ounce labs and RSA

What do you get for sponsoring

 * Many thanks, and hopefully a very good feeling of helping the community.


 * The ability to display your value proposition in a portable booth where you can put up a "roll up" poster or two and hand out your brochures and freebies.


 * Logo on the conference page.


 * If there is something specific that you may want and is within the OWASP guidelines, we will most certainly accommodate.


 * The ability to maximize marketing dollars by not competing with your competitors. For example, if you company sells static analysis tools, you will be the only vendor with the opportunity to sponsor.

What you don't get

 * List of people registering. You can collect yourself in the booth, for example by offering a prize for people filling in details.


 * A lecture for money. The conference program is strictly selected on professional terms.
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How is sponsorship money leveraged
OWASP is very strictly not-for-profit. We will use your generous sponsorship to help make our events more compelling to the audience while striving to make them free for participants. We want more people to come to our events so we can educate them about making applications more secure.

We use the money collected from sponsors for things such as:


 * Lecture videos - filming presentations enables them to be available also to people who cannot make it to the conference.


 * Refreshments - we want to keep people a long time, and we certainly bring good and interesting speakers, yet we don't want people to go home when they become hungry.


 * Name tags - we feel that getting to know each other is important and name tags make it possible.


 * Promotion - Up to now our events are propagating by word of mouth. We would like to get to a wider audience by advertising our events.


 * Printed Materials - We are not very keen on killing trees, but some people learn more from actual printed paper. We would like to start handing out printed materials in out conferences.

By the way, if you feel that you can contribute to any of these in anyway besides money, we will be happy to discuss.

What should you prepare as a sponsor
As a sponsor, you are not obliged to do anything. Sponsorship can be a philanthropy. However in order to take advantage of the benefits listed above, we recommend the following:


 * Send us a logo file to put on the conference web page.


 * Prepare a roll up type poster or equivalent for your table top booth (if you don't have portable booths).


 * Prepare brochures for handling out to conference attendees.


 * You might also want hold a raffle between people who fill in their details in order to collect leads. We will be happy to announce the prize on the conference page. In the past, raffles have included Microsoft Zune Players, Logo Apparel and other electronic gadgets.


 * Come 30 minutes before the conference starts to setup your booth.

For further details contact [mailto:owasp@jamesmcgovern.com James McGovern].

Non for Profit/Barter Sponsorship of OWASP Hartford Events
We are happy to allow any information security related not-for=profit organization to present at our conference expo. You will get, for free, the same benefits that the commercial vendors get. The only condition is that if you hold similar events we would like to present at those events in return.

We extend the same type of barter to commercial organizations that hold events. If you organize an information security related event, we would let you promote it in our expo in return for having presence in your event.

Contact [mailto:owasp@jamesmcgovern.com James McGovern] for further details.

Sponsoring User Group Meetings
We also host regular meetings and look for companies to host/sponsor these meetings. Pizza and soft drinks are the common refreshments, but alternatives are also OK. Keep in mind that food should accommodate varying dietary requirements of the community (e.g. Vegetarian, Kosher, Gluten Free, etc)

If you want to host such a meeting, contact me [mailto:owasp@jamesmcgovern James McGovern].

OWASP Membership
In addition to sponsoring OWASP Hartford, you can also join OWASP as a member. For details, please refer to this page.