It does not replace ongoing marketing activities that are
happening and need to happen. For example, <snip>
ensuring that those that are attending conferences have the
material they need,
I'd like to address that one. Except for the CDs, and the INGOTs stuff that Ian
Lynch brought, *nothing* at the RegiCon would have been there if I personally
had not arranged it. I asked on several occasions if anyone had any material we
could use, received no response whatsoever, and eventually made up my own
stuff. The booth was popular, but did not look as good as I would have
preferred (for example, we had no big posters for the backdrop, because I had
no way to produce big posters). So what did the "official" marketing activities
do for RegiCon? Not much, as far as I'm concerned.
I was extremely envious of the resources you had mustered Jean, much Kudos to you. At the Moodle conference I had an old manual printed out on my printer ( unbound) a few Black and White A4 posters about the wall and a pile of simple B&W fliers with two comps set up for people to play on 1.9.74 complemented by my gift of gab and Ian with his masterful INGOTs resources. Although the feed back was good, it was a little disappointing, given the excellent location we were given for the booth, not to be able to make much better use of it
We perhaps need to make use of peoples contacts for conferences so that resources are available, especially CDs and books, but also onsite stuff such as posters and the like.
As an aside, I also contacted the publicists for the commercial OOo books, allOne of the common comments I had from people I was discussing OOo with was a similar amazement at the quality of the resources.
of whom sent sample copies for us to display. These were very popular, with the
usual reaction of visitors to the booth saying "I had no idea there were so
many book about OOo!"
I am somewhat unsure as to the value that the Linux Confs other than a time to refresh ones energy from a gathering of similarly impassioned people.
OOo is pretty much a given in Linux circles. Virtually all the Linux distributions come with OOo as part of the bundle so while it's an ideal place to spread the word about INGOTs, are we not otherwise preaching to the choir?
I would encourage people to find out about conferences in their local areas. Find the conferences that an OOo and/or INGOTs booth would be a good fit and get hold of the conf managers and put your case to have a booth.
Some examples of the sort of thing: Educators conferences, especially ICT is a great fit, educators are always having conferences.
I'm hoping to get a booth here: http://www.educause.auckland.ac.nz Especially seeing as how Andy Lark, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing & Communications of Sun Microsystems is a keynote speaker and the conferences major sponsor is the Redmond lot. What a place to promote OOo and looking at the thread running through the keynote speakers... Open Document Formats.
Then there are Small business and Accountants conferences, local body officers and I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea.
I'm not saying that the Linux confs are not valuable, but their value is not in spreading the word. We need to think outside the square.
A disappointment for me was that we missed ACE2005, that's Australasian Computing Education Conference held in Newcastle Aust on Jan 30 to Feb 3 but unfortunately I didn't find out about it till after the fact.
But these are the ones we need to catch. Educate the educators and we enter the consciousness of one of Christiansens groups of overshot customers, children. And that is one of the great strengths of the INGOTs programme, not only do we open their eyes to OOo but we provide with the tools to make use of it.
Here's a couple that have surfaced. In the UK ( http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/ice2/ ) 23-25 Feb 05 and ( http://www.cal-conference.elsevier.com/index.htm ) in April
Then in Phoenix AZ ( http://site.aace.org/conf/ ) Mar 1-5 and Dallas TX ( http://144.162.197.250/eLearning2005.htm ) Apr 2-5
Cheers Yo
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