[Ambassadors] UTOSC 2008 Report

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 16:52 -0600, John Taber wrote:
> David Nalley wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Clint Savage <herlo1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> Well, I know FUDCon Brno is going on right now, I hope everyone is
> >> having fun over there. But I thought I'd better get this going before
> >> I head out on the road again for a bunch of weeks.
> >>
> >> I've been a bit busy cleaning up after UTOSC 2008, but now that I'm
> >> back in the swing of things, there were several blog posts.  A couple
> >> were by me and a few by others to help give an overview of the
> >> conference and its goings on.  Here's a quick list:
> >>
> >> A couple from me:
> >> http://fedoratutorials.com/2008/08/29/utosc-2008-day-1/
> >> http://fedoratutorials.com/2008/08/30/utosc-2008-day-2/
> >>
> >> A couple from Paul:
> >> http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1147
> >> http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1143
> >>
> >> >From others, possibly related to Fedora:
> >> http://www.fozzilinymoo.org/Fozzolog/2008/08/utosc-day-1.html
> >> http://testopia.blogspot.com/2008/09/utosc-2008.html
> >> http://pyrous.net/blog/?p=14
> >> http://blog.endpoint.com/2008/08/camps-presentation-at-utosc-2008.html
> >>
> >> We also have tons of pictures up on our flickr page:
> >>
> >> http://flickr.com/groups/utosc/pool/
> >>
> >> --
> >> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> >> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
> >> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > Wow- sounds like a great event.
> > A few questions for you:
> >
> > How many people were at the conference?
> > How much media was handed out?
> > How many contributors did you garner (I know of at least one)?
> > Any questions I should have asked but didn't?
> >   
> 
> There was a lot of good, hard work (especially on Clint's part) that 
> went into UTOS and overall I would have to say it was a success.  But 
> there was a huge blown opportunity - there were no Fedora (or even any 
> Linux) boxes set up to work with the LCD projectors.  Instead every 
> presenter had to scramble to get their laptops working to present.  In 
> many cases it meant delayed presentations, a poor impression of linux, 
> or the use of Mac or Windows.   In the room my talk was in, I watched a 
> prior presenter struggle to get his linux presentation working and 
> finally settling for 640x480.   To get a decent resolution, I had to 
> borrow a Macbook Pro, running OSX (and even then I couldn't show or use 
> the bottom status bar during demos).  And on keynote night, there was a 
> bunch of sighs and comments around where I was sitting during the time 
> Paul struggled and was delayed getting his keynote presentation running 
> with Fedora.

Yeah, I wasn't happy about that either, but it was unforeseen.  My
laptop has worked with every other projector I've tried in the six
months I've had it -- maybe a dozen or so total.  Part of the problem
was no one was familiar with how to get the projector to auto-adjust.
In the end, I would hope that people realize other O/S's (and indeed
other Linuxes) have exactly the same problems and this doesn't make
Fedora special or worse, but I have no control over what people choose
to take away in that regard.

> In short - not a very good linux or Fedora impression for 
> first timers to linux.   Partly this is a reflection on goofy Utah where 
> family activities like kid's face painting need to take precedence over 
> technical AV prowness just to attract attendees.   Contrast this to 
> OSCON where I was told that every presentation setup had Ubuntu running 
> so the audience kept seeing Ubuntu  running on the big screen in from of 
> them. 

I don't get the "goofy" comment -- I thought this was rather endearing
and, speaking as a family man myself, it made the event kind of special
for me.

I do agree that simply having laptops running and having the presenters
bring a USB stick up to the podium (for example) would have been better,
but hindsight's 20/20 and I'm sure next year will see improvements, just
as this year's UTOSC was undoubtedly even better than last year's.

> So to anyone else running a FOSS/Fedora conference, try to have linux 
> boxes (in this case Fedora) set up for all presenters.  Or have some 
> linux friendly LCD projectors that speakers, who need to use their own 
> laptops, can use and set up ahead of time in the speaker room.   It's 
> great free PR to show Fedora/Linux running on all the presentations and 
> it reinforces to the audience that Linux is ready for the desktop and 
> can be counted on.   It's one thing to hand out media, it's even more 
> effective to show it being used.

Well, to be fair, we *did* show it being used at our booth, and in the
hands of various presenters (not just me).  And by the way, my laptop
worked just fine with the projectors in both my other sessions, it's
just the keynote projector that had a problem. ;-)  We also showed
Fedora running on OLPC XO's which is something no one else claimed. 

We should keep in mind that UTOSC was a "non-denominational" show, not
Fedora-specific.  We had plenty of Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Debian, Slackware,
Gentoo, and Fedora users around -- and we all got along famously AFAIK.
So it's very likely that you would see different Linuxes around at
different rooms, not one distro to rule them all.  However, I would
encourage you to think about setting up a Fedora BoF at next year's
UTOSC, or some other similar conference, to increase Fedora's
visibility!

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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