Ah LinuxFest... when the Northwest American geek can be seen herding in their native habitat... ;-)
LinuxFest Northwest 2011, held Saturday April 30 & Sunday May 1st, 2011 in (beautiful) Bellingham, WA, was a HUGE success: * >400 DVDs distributed * $585 raised for LFNW * >300 viewers for our live presentations I learned a few things, having run a booth in the past at LFNW, and I'm quite proud of the results. (1) Working closely with the coordinators pays off triple. LFNW typically charges $600 for a booth space, allotting only 6' "Science Fair" tables for free projects. We brought them an offer, with a local company donating $200, and offering to sell t-shirts to raise the balance (yes, I STOLE THIS FROM SCaLE). I know its not a sustainable practice, but Novell's event staff was quite happy to unload the "Sponsored by Novell" openSUSE t-shirts to us, as this was the week of the Attachmate buyout. I made a point of emphasing repeatedly that we were taking LFNW seriously, that we wanted to "Go Big". As a result, I got more interest from the onganizational and volunteer staff: openSUSE was used as the basis for the "tutorium", where new users were being taught how to setup and use Linux - all the volunteers for that project were only taught how to do one distro: openSUSE; in the "game den" where Linux was being demonstrated as a viable gaming platform by running a 2-day long lan party, openSUSE and Pavol Rusnak's openSUSE game store ( http://gamestore.gk2.sk/ ) were the foundation; and when it came to setting up some PCs to do registration at the event, naturally we were there to help. So all in all, openSUSE *owned* LFNW! (2) Be smart about attracting audience. I had initially planned to design & print a poster to put up as many places around town as I could. Turns out, I printed up 15 full-glossy posters instead (thanks to Costco for cheap prints ) and carefully placed them: at local Tech shops for staff (even Best Buy was happy to put one up in their lunchroom), at tech hangouts (coffee shops located close to industry), and I talked a librarian into allowing me to hang one by the computers at the library instead of their general bulletin board. The rest went up around the event space, to draw eyeballs to us. Each poster has info on the booth, our presentations schedule, a splash about the t-shirt sales, and a link & QR code to the wiki for more/updated info. I can't count how many people mentioned seeing the posters, which was amazing and gratifying. (3) Hug your local podcaster. I worked with Jupiter Broadcasting, who we have a pretty good reputation with, to make sure they had a good presence at the show. In a fit of backscratching, they elected to broadcast one of our presentation on their live streams, along with their own. The SUSE Studio presentation had over 250 viewers online, in addition to the 25 - 30 in the room. (You'll have to ask Alan Clark or suseROCKS for details on their own session). The guys also asked to interview Alan Clark for their weekly video podcast, the Linux Action Show ( http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/7656/lfnw2011/ ) I've updated the wiki page ( http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:LinuxFestNorthwest2011 ) with a bit of content, links to presentation materials, and some photos. If anyone else has something to add there, feel free, or email me and I'll integrate it. Big thanks to all the people who helped make this event so successful for us: suseROCKS, Brando, and Alan Clark for coming out to the event and doing everything they could; Yamato Engine Specialists for donating $200 to get us a booth space as well as equipment to demo with; Alexia Henrie at Novell Events for getting me the materials I needed and being super-helpful about the awkward logistics; Jos for fronting travel costs and letting me eat up his US t-shirt supplies; and Pavol Rusnak for doing a quick update to the Game Store to make it work with 11.4. - James Mason 'bear454' -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
