Installfest thoughts

[Paul Mora]

On 8/28/05, Colin McGregor <colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Something to be discussed, I passed out some 300
> flyers promoting this event, nobody showed, what went
> wrong?
> 
> - Was the flyer wrong look/layout?
> - Did I not promote the event in the right places?
> - Was the date wrong (i.e.: end of summer)?
> - Was the place wrong (too far from subway)?
> - Something else?
> 

Perhaps it was a combination of things. The date may have something to do 
with it... lots of people are on summer vacation, and may not have seen the 
notices (I'm not sure where you handed them out, but I imagine they got to 
all the "hot spots"). 

One thing that came to me today, was that maybe the projected audience was 
at fault. Who were we targeting here? The average Joe User, who runs Windows 
on his/her machine? Small business owners? So-called "power" users, or other 
techies? It seems to me that most Installfests are geared towards people who 
have already made the decision to switch to Linux, and have had 
difficulties. Perhaps there just aren't that many people out there... :-)

One thing to consider for the next Installfest is to combine it with some 
sort of series of talks or lectures, sort of like a trade show, so to speak. 
Break the day into two, and have some information sessions in the morning, 
with the Installfest in the afternoon. You could entice the end-users with 
freebies; stuff from some of the major "user" distros like Mandriva, 
Xandros, Linspire, Ubuntu, etc. Get someone to sponsor the event and provide 
a simple lunch (pizza for example). Have a question/answer period just 
before lunch.

You could also arrange it so that there are some talks for the end-user, and 
also talks for the business community. I'd figure the talks be between 30 
and 45 minutes; you could start off generally, by defining things like "open 
source", "GNU GPL", then narrowing the scope to Linux, why you'd want to use 
it. A talk about the different distributions is also good.

Anyway, there's my $0.02.

pm

-- 
Paul Mora
email: paulmora-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20050830/905a2358/attachment.html>