Hello fellow MarCons,
sorry for writing nearly two months late, but I've been swamped with
work the last weeks. The Marketing Project generously gave us, the
Germanophone project, funding for CeBIT, which took place from March 3rd
to March 8th in Hannover, Germany and I wanted to share some impressions
with you.
CeBIT is still one of the world's largest tradeshows and has been an
important event for us ever since. Unfortunately, due to the long
duration of the trade show and the high hotel costs, it is also been
very expensive. CeBIT offers free booths for open source projects, but
with only one demo point, so for us, it's rather small. Apart from that,
we have been successfully exhibiting with commercial companies offering
services and support on OpenOffice.org for years - therefore we had to
manage the booth ourselves and were not able to take the free offer.
Fundings have been provided by the Marketing Project via
TeamOpenOffice.org and via another German nonprofit, OpenOffice.org
Deutschland e.V. Thanks again!
Although less exhibitors and visitors attended CeBIT this year, it was
still a huge success for us. We had our booth next to the other open
source projects and next to one attracting place, the so called
"WebCiety". Although no one really knew what WebCiety was about, many
visitors came exactly there, and therefore also visited our booth. :-)
We had a team of volunteers from the Germanophone project who stayed all
the time: Jacqueline Rahemipour, André Schnabel, Thomas Krumbein,
Karsten Schulz and myself. Many other volunteers - about 15 in total -
helped us to man the booth. We're glad that also our fellow colleagues
from Sun Microsystems - especially Joost Andrae, Michael Bohn and Rosana
Ardila - joined us with their own demo point. Thanks everyone for their
great contribution!
CeBIT has been a tremendous success for us. Many visitors - small home
users up to large enterprises - came to our booth to ask general or
specific questions, and press coverage was fantastic. André and myself
gave an interview for a local radio station, the ZDF (German public
television) interviewed Thomas Krumbein and the dpa (German Press
Agency) made a widely-used article about OpenOffice.org and extensions
during the trade show based on a phone call with me. Apart from giving
interviews and answering user questions, we also had many talks: two
talks have been held at "forum open source" from Linux New Media, and on
Sunday, we had our dedicated OpenOffice.org lecture day, thanks to the
generous sponsoring of a German company called Heinlein Support (thanks
again, Per!).
After one week of exhibiting, everyone was pretty exhausted, but it
definitely was worth the trip. Many good contacts came up due to CeBIT,
and the press coverage is very important for us.
Those of you who speak German, feel free to read my blog entry at
http://www.linux-magazin.de/blogs/floeff/freie_software_als_zugpferd_rueckblick_auf_die_cebit_2009
with some more thoughts. Everyone else, als read it, it has a picture of
our booth where you can see how many people were looking for
OpenOffice.org. :-)
Thanks to everyone for sponsoring the trip and for manning the booth.
Looking forward to CeBIT 2010!
Florian
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