[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu-uk Digest, Vol 63, Issue 34 - Non Technical Events

[Alan Pope]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for the reply ;)

On 19 July 2010 15:58, Nigel Verity <nigelverity at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect that there are vast numbers of people to whom the philosophical
> and financial aspects of free/open source software would be very attractive.
> Trouble is, they've probably never heard of it. Where do we go to talk about
> FLOSS? OggCamp, LUGs and the like. Great and enjoyable as those events are,
> they don't do much to "spread the word".
>

Absolutely! That's the main motivation to do something different.
After posting this mail and the blog post one of the people who run
the Massachusetts loco team said I basically described them! They do
lots of advocacy at events where "tech" isn't the main attraction. So
we're behind the curve on this :)

> The suggestion to go and have stalls at village and school fetes, etc, is
> brilliant. They usually cost next to nothing to exhibit at. The only
> downside I can see is that it is sometimes difficult to get a mains supply
> on a stall at such events. Mind you, there are always laptops, I suppose.
>

If you can park a car nearby then an inverter could be used to top-up
a laptop battery here and there ;)

> One thing I've learned after years of attending trade and techie exhibitions
> is that knocking the opposition doesn't actually work.

I completely agree. We've got some pages on the wiki which talk about
'best practice' for attending conferences/events:-

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAtConferences
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ConferenceTopTips

I've added them to the UK/NonTechEvents page:-

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/NonTechEvents

Cheers,
Al.