Cebit Report 2008

[Robert M. Albrecht]

Hi,

I occupied the KDE booth for two days.

The small booths for open source projects are free. Linux New Media 
(largest german magazine publisher for Linux) sponsors them.

So next year, all we have to cover is travel and a place to sleep.

Hotels hat cebit-times are out of the questios (several hundred euros per 
night). KDE rendet a flat for a week and all kde-people stayed there. Seems 
that many Hannover residents leave the town for the cebit-week and rent 
their flat / home to companys.

Food is very expensive, so you have to bring your own. Getting some slots 
for presentations or talks is fairly easy.

Most people came to the KDE booth and asked non-kde questions 
(installation, can I run MS Office, drivers, ...) , so there is a large 
audience for spreading linux and open source in general.

Debian had a small booth and ubuntu had both booths, althoug very badly 
placed. KDE and Gnome were perfectly placed. Opensuse was present with two 
PCs at Novell.

I posted some pictures in my blog: blog.romal.de

And sadly, Fedora ist not very know in Germany. Suse and Ubuntu are the big 
players.

The weekend was mainly enduser, the other day are business-users. We had a 
lot more visitors on saturday than on sunday.

As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really get a 
presence their next year.

cu romal

[Gerold]

...
>  As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really get a
>  presence their next year. 
^^
I agree with one objection: The costs are somewhere in a budget and
payable ...

Regards

Gerold

[Robert Scheck]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Gerold wrote:
>  > As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really
> get a
>  > presence their next year.
>  ^^
>  I agree with one objection: The costs are somewhere in a budget and
>  payable ... 
Maybe Max and Paul can increase the budget for Fedora for FY10 just a very
little bit, that the 100 sqm are possible at Cebit as well? :-)))

Cebit is quite expensive, booth and hotel. And on the other hand, business
is not really the target audience of Fedora, sorry. Maybe CentOS should get
there, but not Fedora as bleeding edge for hackers. Just my 5 Ct...


Greetings,
 Robert

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Gerold wrote:
>  ...
> > As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really get a
> > presence their next year.
>  ^^
>  I agree with one objection: The costs are somewhere in a budget and
>  payable ...
>   
That is not an objection, that's a problem ;-) Or, as I like to look at 
problems; it's a challenge :)

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

[John Babich]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip(a)kanarip.com&gt; wrote:
>  Gerold wrote:
>   > ...
>   >> As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really get a
>   >> presence their next year.
>   > ^^
>   > I agree with one objection: The costs are somewhere in a budget and
>   > payable ...
>   >
>
>   That is not an objection, that's a problem ;-) Or, as I like to look at
>   problems; it's a challenge :)
>  
+1 on need for presence at Cebit
+1 on challenge, not problem, of budget

As you may know, I organized the first Fedora presence at GITEX in
Dubai last September.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/GITEX for details.

I was new to the process, but despite my ignorance, Lloyd Almeida, a
local Fedora ambassador, and I managed to make one-on-one
presentations, booth talks on Fedora Project and OLPC, and give aways
hundreds of DVDs and live CDs.

It's hard to measure metrics on such an event (for one thing, we were
swamped with interested people), but I would guess the 500 media
distributed would count for something.

What was beyond measure was the benefit of sharing the Red Hat booth
with a few other Red Hat partners, who eagerly promoted Fedora along
with Red Hat.

Despite the high cost of living in Dubai, I managed to spend 5 days
there for under $140, thanks to a friend providing a place to stay.

It's a different audience than FOSS events, but well worth the effort.

Best Regards,

John Babich
Fedora Ambassador
Member, FAmSCo

[Joerg Simon]

Am Dienstag, 11. März 2008 15:05:53 schrieb John Babich:
>  +1 on need for presence at Cebit
>  +1 on challenge, not problem, of budget
>  It's a different audience than FOSS events, but well worth the effort. 
Who is the audience?
Can we push them to support the FedoraProject? 
If yes, how?

And because it is a business focused event, there should be a concept to 
achieve certain goals, like - indroduce them the EPEL Repo, or how it can 
help to raise the quality of their "inhouse builds" to package for the EPEL 
Repo, or explain them why it is a good thing to encourage their employees to 
work for the Fedoraproject. 

Yes Fedora should be there.  

Viele Guesse Joerg

-- 
Jörg Simon
jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
Key Fingerprint:
3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688

[Robert M. Albrecht]

Hi,

>  Who is the audience? 
Cebit is mainly business, but there is a high percentage of endusers. Cebit 
is flooding people with free tickets, as the visitors declinded the last years.

Saturday they had even free entry for women.

And Fedora is not strictly non-business. We use it in our company, 
Wikipedia uses Fedora, Nasa, ...

And Cebit is worldwide! I attended the KDE booth this year and had some 
interessting talks to people from all over the world: India, Russia, 
Chinese, some smaller countries like Rumania, Aserbaidshan and Ukraine.

>  Can we push them to support the FedoraProject?  
The first step is to increase its visibility at all. Fedora is mostly 
unkown in Germany.

And for competitive reasons alone: Ubuntu, Debian and openSuse are present.

The whole Redhat family is missing. Redhat was absent this year (god knows 
why). Fedora and CentOS too.

>  And because it is a business focused event, there should be a concept
> to 
>  achieve certain goals, like - indroduce them the EPEL Repo, or how it can 
>  help to raise the quality of their "inhouse builds" to package for the EPEL 
>  Repo, or explain them why it is a good thing to encourage their employees to 
>  work for the Fedoraproject.  
EPEL might be a good thing to show in a talk.

I will try to get a presence in 2009.

cu romal

[Gerold]

Well Robert,

maybe we should discuss this issue off topic on Linuxtag in a group
together with Max becuase I also see at the moment some "challenges" to
do so and also not to do so ...

Regards+
Gerold


Am Dienstag, den 11.03.2008, 21:38 +0100 schrieb Robert M. Albrecht:
>  Hi,
>  
>  > Who is the audience?
>  
>  Cebit is mainly business, but there is a high percentage of endusers. Cebit 
>  is flooding people with free tickets, as the visitors declinded the last years.
>  
>  Saturday they had even free entry for women.
>  
>  And Fedora is not strictly non-business. We use it in our company, 
>  Wikipedia uses Fedora, Nasa, ...
>  
>  And Cebit is worldwide! I attended the KDE booth this year and had some 
>  interessting talks to people from all over the world: India, Russia, 
>  Chinese, some smaller countries like Rumania, Aserbaidshan and Ukraine.
>  
>  > Can we push them to support the FedoraProject? 
>  
>  The first step is to increase its visibility at all. Fedora is mostly 
>  unkown in Germany.
>  
>  And for competitive reasons alone: Ubuntu, Debian and openSuse are present.
>  
>  The whole Redhat family is missing. Redhat was absent this year (god knows 
>  why). Fedora and CentOS too.
>  
>  > And because it is a business focused event, there should be a concept to 
>  > achieve certain goals, like - indroduce them the EPEL Repo, or how it can 
>  > help to raise the quality of their "inhouse builds" to package for the
> EPEL 
>  > Repo, or explain them why it is a good thing to encourage their employees to 
>  > work for the Fedoraproject. 
>  
>  EPEL might be a good thing to show in a talk.
>  
>  I will try to get a presence in 2009.
>  
>  cu romal
>  
>  --
>  Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>  Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>   
-- 
Gerold Kassube <gerold(a)lugd.org&gt;

[Peter Reuschlein]

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| Cebit is mainly business, but there is a high percentage of endusers. 
Cebit is flooding people with free tickets, as the visitors declinded 
the last years.
|
| Saturday they had even free entry for women.
|
| And Fedora is not strictly non-business. We use it in our company, 
Wikipedia uses Fedora, Nasa, ...
|
| And Cebit is worldwide! I attended the KDE booth this year and had 
some interessting talks to people from all over the world: India, 
Russia, Chinese, some smaller countries like Rumania, Aserbaidshan and 
Ukraine.
Might be interresting especially because its getting more and more "non 
- profi" users. Cebit got in the enduser area during the last years also 
it was focused on b2b.
|
|
| The first step is to increase its visibility at all. Fedora is mostly 
unkown in Germany.
|
| And for competitive reasons alone: Ubuntu, Debian and openSuse are 
present.
|
| The whole Redhat family is missing. Redhat was absent this year (god 
knows why). Fedora and CentOS too.
Don´t know if is an good idea, but like the idea of a booth for all 
together. So present the diffrent ways within the projects / products. 
Mainly for endusers with Fedora, the Server enviroment with CentOS
and the productive and mission - critical Systems with Redhat. That 
would show that there is only a single way to go. Why learn 3 diffrent 
OS when there is something like Fedora / CentOS / RHEL that are pretty 
familiar to each others.
The question might be if there will be a catching the users from each 
others.

Not so deep into that things yet

greetings
Peter
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[Matthias Kranz]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 21:38 +0100, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:
>  The whole Redhat family is missing. Redhat was absent this year (god
> knows 
>  why). 
Well he does of course. But one of the reasons certainly is that Red Hat
is a company who does a cost-benefit analysis for every marketing
effort. The CeBIT has changed over the last ten years. Marketing
strategies have changed, too.

And to add my personal experience to this thread: I was attending the
CeBIT for the last 12 years. Most times I was there for the whole week
or the eight days it once was. There are zillions of end users just
browsing over the fair area. They are of course especially attracted by
the areas in which they will find some free stuff to take with as well
as those areas in which the booth staff is used to talk to them and not
interested in classifying them as "non-business equals non-interesting".

Matthias
-- 
Matthias Kranz
http://mkr.oerks.de

[Max Spevack]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Gerold wrote:

> > As Cebit is the worlds largest computer fair, we should really
> get a
> > presence their next year.
>  ^^
>  I agree with one objection: The costs are somewhere in a budget and
>  payable ... 
We are putting process in place from FAMSCo that will ensure 
significantly better funding of events in the future year, worldwide.

Jeffrey Tadlock has already sent a draft of this new process out to all 
Ambassadors for review.  I am traveling this week (actually writing this 
email from a plane), but I will be available to answer questions, and I 
am 100% confident that FAMSCo can also handle any questions that might 
show up.

Our event process this coming year will be significantly improved -- I 
will personally guarantee it and work to ensure it.

Thank you all for your hard work as Ambassadors worldwide.

--Max