On Friday 10 May 2013 15:30:31 James Mason wrote:
LinuxFest Northwest took place the last weekend in April, as usual, and was an *amazing* event for openSUSE!
Prior to the event, I organized a social media schedule, posting to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus every day of the week prior, with photos and info about our presence.
As an event sponsor[1], we received a 100sq.ft. booth space[2] in a preferred area of the conference hall. This space was put to excellent use, creating an open and inviting area[3], instead of the 'stand in front of my desk' approach offered by most exhibitors: * In the rear, a 21" HP Touchsmart PC was setup with openSUSE 12.3 and KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, and E17, providing a nice way to demonstrate our desktop experience * Next to the PC we had some space for doing Chameleon[4] and Penguin[5] origami projects. (Origami is a great metaphor for open source... you can expound on that yourself ;) * SWAG was set off to the side, behind a 6ft tall whiteboard (loaned to us by Attachmate Bellingham), to reduce the number of people simply walking by and grabbing stuff, although we kindly offered a kit (brochure, DVD, round sticker, system sticker) to anyone who asked. * The largest volume of the booth was taken up by a pair of lime green (SUSE green?) lawn chairs, and Geeko-themed table. The goal was to get people to 'come in' to openSUSE, and have a deeper interaction with a smaller, interested group, rather than to just hand out stuff to a crowd. We regularly updated the whiteboard with presentation times & locations by openSUSE Advocates, our 'Articles of Faith', and some questions/statements to spur conversation ("Ask me about SUSE Studio!"; "Is your app built with OBS?"). And of course, there was the bubble wrap. Loud green bubble wrap. Why? Just to make some noise, and have some fun. That's the point, right?
Speaking of SWAG, we handed out 206 kits, which was fewer than I had anticipated (I ordered 300), but I expect to consume the rest distribution to the local LUG[6] and northwest US TAG offices. This was the first year that a substantial number of people were getting openSUSE via other means: "I already downloaded it"; "Can you put an image on my thumb drive"; "Can you copy the Raspberry Pi image to my SD card"; etc.
The biggest change this year, over previous LFNW events, was that all the booth staff were local. In prior years, I've worked with Ted Haeger, Joe Brockmeyer, Alan Clark, Jos, and Bryan Yunashko here at LFNW; this year I put out a 'call for help' through local channels, and had three users (I'm going to call them Advocates from now on) step up to help: Bryan Lunduke - a local developer and media genius/whore, Adrian Klaver - a local Qt developer and avid fan of our KDE desktop, and Carl Symons (who in the end was unable to attend due to family emergencies) - a KDE contributor. We also informally picked up two more helpers: Chani Armitage spent a bit of time hanging around since there wasn't a dedicated KDE booth this year; and Caleb Gebhart, a local student who (hopefully) has signed up for openSUSE+GSoC this year. All in all, it was *awesome* having local help, and I expect to have more people representing different facets of the openSUSE community next year (although I wouldn't mind at all if someone flew in to have some fun)!
Jupiter Broadcasting, a WA-based podcasting network was broadcasting live from the event, and recording interviews for use on the Linux Action Show[7][8]. My interview[9] got a fair amount of positive feedback, demonstrating, again, how we're trying to build an inclusive openSUSE community, that is related to, but not subjugated by the SUSE Enterprise.
I suppose I should mention the final attendance numbers[10]: "We had 1250 registered attendees and it is estimated that we had a total of about 1400 to 1500 people at the Fest."
I need to thank a few people who helped out behind the scenes... although openSUSE would've had a presence at LFNW without them, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun: * Agustin Bethencourt, openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE, for approving SUSE's sponsorship. * Alan Clark, Director of Open Source(and more) at SUSE, for being his usual amazingly helpful self, and getting me a banner and brochures at the last minute. * Darren Clark, Director of Development at Attachmate, for making office resources available for use at the event. Thanks guys!
In summary, LFNW was a fun, positive event, with a tremendous amount of support for openSUSE. I'm looking forward to making our presence even better next year!
This was an awesome report, dude, on an awesome event... ;-)
[1] http://www.linuxfestnorthwest.org/sponsor/opensuse [2] http://www.linuxfestnorthwest.org/sponsors/map [3] http://goo.gl/HXL2u [4] https://en.opensuse.org/File:Origami_instructions_chameleon.png [5] https://en.opensuse.org/File:Origami_instructions_penguin.png [6] http://blug.org/ [7] http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/36476/linuxfest-nw-pt-1-las-s26e08/ [8] http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/36666/linuxfest-nw-2013-pt-2-las-s26e09/ [9] http://youtu.be/8u3yUF9p9WQ?t=40m35s [10] https://plus.google.com/111293764782511971489/posts/3RYn9qByAvU