[Ambassadors] Event Report: Lindependence 2008

[Karsten Wade]

I missed the first few events, so will rely upon Larry put something
together on those.  This is my report from the final Lindependence 2008
day on Saturday 26 July.

The event was held in a church hall in the town of Felton, as part of
the effort of teaching and transforming a small town to using FLOSS:

http://www.lindependence.net/

I set up a table for Fedora, with banner, posters, and two laptops.  I
spent a chunk of my time trying to get a live USB to work; there is
either a problem with the batch of USB keys I have, or my T41 laptop was
messing it up.  From all of that I was able to show a few Fedora
features, mainly the live USB capabilities.

Over the course of the day, there seemed to be up to several dozen
people there, including a documentary film maker[1], and several kids.
One of them, a 12 year-old boy, was a full-on Mandriva freak.  Whatever
they do for him, Mandriva has earned a good proponent. :)

As an installfest, this event was not highly successful, in that people
brought questions instead of machines to install. :(  Of the questions
about existing or upcoming Linux installs, the majority of discussion
went to Ubuntu.  There was one person who came late-ish to represent
Ubuntu, he was quite knowledgeable about Fedora as well.  I added his
Ubuntu ISO to mine for an install server, but no one ended up using it.

As an education event with an equal or greater focus on moving people
along toward freedom and open source, it was a fair success.  For
example, I talked extensively with a person from a small ISV interested
in being in Fedora.  I also explained open source, business models, etc.
Across the series of events (three separate days, iirc), up to one
hundred people came in contact with the FLOSS advocates at the event.
That is a sizeable % of the town population, and word of mouth seemed to
be in effect.

Outcomes from this (series of) event(s):

* The forming of a new G/LUG in Felton
* Another Lindependence in Boulder Creek
* Potentially another Lindependence in a town in Oregon

What interests me about this methodology is the focus on small,
relatively insular communities that have a higher than average number of
people passionate about freedom.

So far I've spent about $50 of the $500 budgeted to me for this event
series.  That was used for making three vinyl banners of 'infinity',
'freedom', and 'voice' that are joining the (Western reagion) event kit.

Larry and I thought it was a good idea to save the rest of the budget to
support the Lindependence event in Boulder Creek.  We'll get a Fedora
sponsorship for that, and I'm planning to give a general FLOSS talk at
one of those events, as well as providing installfest support.

- Karsten

[1] http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com/
-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41