Report on Associations Day 9th September, 2017.

As everything in France starts with food, we started the day with a big breakfast, not heavy but enough to keep going until lunch time J

When we arrived on site, it was like a construction site, people with all sort of material. All that looked very promising and we were very excited about the day.

Present: Laurence, Marilla, Nathalie, Morgan, Olivier and myself. We had others who came round for coffee and/or were busy on other stands ‘bees, repair café, ecology, hiking, etc.

The organizers from the City have computed that the number of visitors was approximately 4500. I can vouch for this because we had ~30 visitors per hour and that for 8 hours. We printed 300 B5 brochures and had only a few left in the evening.

We also had our 4G LTE Huawei router and some neighbors asked to free wifi…

The memorable visitors were:

1. The first person who barged in was an entrepreneur willing to sell us banners et al. As we operate with 0€ budget, we politely invited him to visit he next door neighbors J

2. Three persons (two men and a lady) over the day, proposed to volunteer for our association. Meaning that the core is growing. That’s pretty good.

3. Two teachers were after DVDs and giveaways.

4. We had a couple of rain showers, but the crowd kept coming. Due to weather conditions, we sort of lost ~50 visitors who just walked pass every stand and not stopping L

5. As usual, we had the ad hoc geeks who acclaimed other Linux distributions but agreed to test openSUSE Leap 42.3, but one geek was sort of seeking Holy water to sprinkle over our stand :D

6. The mayor visited the stands (as each year), we chatted a bit, taboo subjects were budget, resources and bigger meeting rooms J

7. We also visited the other stands and found out that again this year, we were the only IT geeks from Normandie at this annual event in the capital of Normandie.

8. Most visitors promised to come and learn from our monthly insets

After packing up, I invited the gang to an Alsatian restaurant. In a nutshell, we had a lot of fun!

Here is a short auto Collage:

http://www.nui.fr/blog/journee-des-associations-de-rouen/