IT360 self evaluation

[Colin McGregor]

I home that a large percentage of the people on this
mailing list got down to the IT360 trade show last
week and had a chance to look around, visit the GTALug
booth and so on.

So, we now have about 11 months to get ready for the
next IT360 show (next year the show will be mid-April
rather than early May). With this in mind, some
questions need to be asked like:

What did we do well at this show and want to repeat?
What went so-so?
What should we do differently?

Other things we will need to keep in mind, the
organization the supplied us with booth furnishing for
the 2005 and 2006 shows pulled out at the last minute
on this show. Fortunately, David Patrick was able to
land us an ... adequate ... last minute replacement
(which really was appreciated). Questions for next
year:

What makes for a great booth?
How can we get a great booth on a very limited budget?

Some ideas that were sort of dropped on the floor for
this year's due to lack of time/money can now be
revisited. 

The BSD people at the show got a LOT of notice due to
their clothing, the daemon tails, the clip on horns,
the daemon boxer short underwear... (not sure if it
was cost effective notice, but notice). So in that
area:

Do we want to do GTALug and/or Tux clothing items?

There was a fair bit of positive response to the idea
of doing an electronic name badge at this year's show,
but time/cash prevented that from going very far. At
some past science fiction conventions I saw a few guys
with LED based badges somewhat along the following
lines:

  www.larwe.com/zws/products/picxie2/index.html

What I saw at those conventions was a badge done with
2 PCB board (one mounted above the other, top holding
the LEDs, the lower one with the ICs and a coin size
battery). The above has some real possibilities for
our group. The biggest pain in building in the above
as described would be wiring the 64 light emitting
diodes. Fortunately, due to the electronic sign people
you can now buy 64 LED tiles pre-wired... The nice
thing about this design being it can be done on
inexpensively, on the down side, time/effort/etc..

Do we want to go with some sort electronic name badge?
If so, which design?


Colin McGregor

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