Thank you Sharan for the report, and all who helped to make this possible

Heartily

Jacques

Le 05/02/2019 à 21:21, Sharan Foga a écrit :
Hi Everyone

Last weekend FOSDEM was held in Brussels so wanted to post a quick update.

FOSDEM weather is generally quite predictable (read that as bad!) and this time 
as well as rain, it snowed!  Yet even with the bad weather, thousands of people 
made the effort to attend.

Daniel flew in with our swag collection, I brought the banner and stickers. 
Normally we are on the first floor but this time we were located on the ground 
flow at the end of the row around from the reception. We arrived early on 
Saturday morning to setup the booth, and although things officially started at 
10am, we had a crowd a few people deep, around the booth from 9.30am onwards 
ready to talk to us (or maybe they had seen our wonderful swag which included 
some very nice warm fleece hats :-)

As well as the stickers and swag we also had a chrome book available for 
project demos and on Sunday we used it to run the video about Apache 
statistics. This was really useful for looking up project details and showing 
people where to get additional information.

Our new location also meant that we had a lot of foot traffic and thanks to our 
booth volunteers, we managed to laugh, talk, joke and well as inform a lot more 
people about Apache, and Apache projects. We had queries ranging from incubator 
to how to foundation itself works.

For the last couple of years, people had always been asking for Cassandra 
stickers so this time we had some – so this is when all the people wanting 
other stickers appeared and this years top request was Kafka followed by 
Commons and even Thrift! I told people that if we printed stickers for every 
single Apache project – the booth table would collapse!

It was good to see a few projects represented at the booth – these included 
Beam, Httpd, Tomcat, Fineract, OFBiz, Kibble and Jena (Sorry if I’ve missed 
any!) and there were also a few Apache related talks on the schedule.

Being at FOSDEM is great for outreach as well as the visibility of the 
Foundation and as a result we have been invited to participate at even more 
events.

I’d really like to thank everyone that was involved in helping out to make the 
event a success. Special mentions go out to the “swagman Daniel”, Rich, Claude, 
Lars, Jean-Frederic, Gris and Myrle!

One thing we did start was the idea of getting people to ‘buy the ASF a coffee’ 
or ‘buy the ASF a beer’ to get people to think about donating 2 – 5 euro 
especially if any of the ASF projects had helped them in someway. This 
potentially could be something to look into for next time.

By the way – I was hoarse from talking by the time I got back home! Looking 
forward to doing it all again next year if we get the chance.

I'm happy to hear about any other FOSDEM experiences, feedback, thoughts, 
comments.

Thanks
Sharan

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