Well, just got back from Hull University, and HullFLOSS’s first ‘event’. I could only attend today, but the event was over 2 days (Other members of the SiG manned the stand yesterday). Now I’m not sure what metrics you can measure these events against, especially not this soon after the event, but I’m going to use the number of CD’s given away as an indication: CD’s weren’t given out willy-nilly like a lot of things at Freshers Fairs, only to people who came and had a chat and seem genuinely interested were offered a CD. We still managed give give away about 200 CD’s. Most of these were Ubuntu disks, but there were a few Kubuntu and MythTV disks as well. We had a lot of interest in the LUG aswell, with several ‘pledges’ to come along to the next meet.
The thing that interests me the most from the conversations I have had is the broad range of experience with FLOSS. IT varied from people who had tried it in the past, but weren’t impressed, but were impressed by what we had on show. Chris had put together a playlist including a phenomenal XGL video that looked really good, Elephant’s Dream (which I have still got to watch) and a firefox advert. These drew people in so we could talk to them, and some were amazed that the things we were showing them were free (as in beer). Some may only install Firefox & Thunderbird on a Windows machine, but I still feel that this would be a victory.
So where do we go from here? The CMS should be uploaded this week in it’s (almost) skeleton form, but skillfully skinned to give a professional appearance by Sean. Then we are going to primarily focus on a big sponsorship drive in the community. This will raise us some funds so that we can pay for stands at events, and get some of our leaflets printed professionally. One other thing that I want to do is to expand on Chris’s idea from this weekend, and build a ‘repository’ of videos that we can use at events. I’m going to look at various places and various themes. For example astopy mentioned on his blog a BBC Documentary on OSS that has been released under a CC license, that is available to download as a DVD ISO, so I will look at whether this is usable. I will also look at some more adverts from the SpreadFirefox site, to see if they are feasible. I think it will end up being a split set of videos, one for demos, and showing off, and a more serious one for documentaries and the such. If anyone has any other ideas, please leave a comment, or contact me directly.
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