[Ambassadors] Ohio Linux fest Ambassadors report

[Andrew Ward]

All,
Please note the below text form from my report on the latest event from 
Ohio.

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Ohio Linux Festival, Columbus Ohio Oct 24-26, Greater Columbus 
Convention Center Main Venue section D.

Fedora Ambassadors report for Andrew Ward (award3535) and Julie Ward 
(jward78)

    We arrived at the Drury Friday afternoon and got settled into the 
room. We then checked on the event and got our registration stuff all 
taken care off that afternoon. I checked out where we needed to set up.

We had the table right next to the Red Hat table. We were in a good 
location at the end or the isle for easy access for everyone to get to. 
This weekend the weather was good and there was not a cloud in the sky. 
We were hoping for a busy day on Saturday.

    We got down to the venue at 0730 to get started on setting up. We 
were shortly joined by the Red Hat Folks and we were all set up by 815.
We noticed that while we were getting set up that there were already a 
lot of people walking around waiting on the first talk session.
There were almost no one there yet except us, Red Hat, and the BSD 
people. This proved to be a great advantage to get their attention.
We didn't have anything that flashed, nor did we have any big 
presentation boards, we only had the product and a few simple items.
That was more than enough for us, between the presentation and questions 
that got answered we did more than was was needed to
make some hard core Debian users at least try fedora. That was a 100 
percent success to us. The first talk was scheduled for 9 a. m.
and we were all set and ready to go, and to say, we did. From 9 a. m. 
until 4 p. m. The two of us were extremely busy. A special thanks
goes to Ricky Elrod (from the Dayton Ohio area) for helping out at the 
booth with us, an unexpected  positive surprise. I had not
checked the event wiki page a few days prior to the event. We left on 
Thursday morning to head up to Ohio, and Ricky had updated
and volunteered. A great many thanks to him.

     By 930 a. m. the Fedora booth was about 4 deep waiting to get a 
look at our table. There was many questions posed to us about why
should I switch from my current O/S, Ubuntu and Debian seemed to be the 
hard pressed distributions. Some individuals were very hard to
discuss anything concerning Fedora, but if I got through to even one of 
them, I felt successful. What I found interesting was even though
those few individuals who were hard to convince to a change to Fedora, 
they still picked up the free media anyway. There were other individuals
  (some of them those hard pressed Debian individuals) were also asking 
questions about Fedora were unaware of the other media available to them 
as well.

    The focus seemed to be on GNOME with the default was not what they 
were looking for, I then explained that there are many others
available to them on the DVD or for down load that included KDE, LXDE, 
and XFCE. That surely got their attention, so I presented that they
should try it before making a judgment call on Fedora. That was enough 
to get those individuals to pick up the multimedia DVD. Again success
in getting the word out to others about the diversity of the product we 
offer.

   The morning was going by so fast, we both felt exhausted by 1030 a. 
m. I had 300 multimedia DVDs that came with me and by 1030 a. m.
they were all gone. Lucky Nick Bebout had mailed to boxes to us that 
arrived at 1145 a. m.  In the mean time, the Linux Pro Magazine that 
featured
Fedora to replace the old windows XP came in quite handy. The magazine 
included an in-depth look at the Fedora, and a installation guide for 
novice users.
This was a wonderful tool for us to use, made great advantage with 
novice and mid range users, and which in turn we also handed out all of the
magazines that we had. I believe that we had over 400 of the magazines 
and every one of them went. The last one left the table at 4 p. m. I 
also had
approximately 40 USB Keys from the last two events, since I had no 
multimedia DVDs at the time I handed those out also turn out to be a hit 
at the table.
I would ask a question along the nature of what they were currently 
using and why, I would then ask what would make it easier for them to at 
least try
Fedora, I got a wide variety of answers but when they found that I would 
hand them a USB key, their attitude changed quite quickly. Even though they
were happy with what they had, a simple USB Key turned things around.

One the resupply arrived, we went through another entire box that 
approximately contained 150.

    Some of the other vendors in attendance was Chef, HP, Linode, POGO, 
the Local Ohio Python Group just to name a few.

    Since the day began we were ready for anything that could be thrown 
at us, I believe the attendance was approximately 2000 if not more.
Since before the booth opened we began to see a steady inflow of people. 
I can only speculate but here is what we believe that was given out,
about 450 Multimedia DVD's, 60 pens, over 500 stickers, 300 case badges, 
200 small Fedora pin on buttons, 40 USB Keys, 60 t shirts, all of the
  LinuxPro Magazines (about 200 or so, maybe more)2 ball caps, 50 
tattoos, and the last of the Beefy Miracles. For some reason our booth 
again
seemed to be the most popular in-site. Julie noted that the more items 
that were on your table for presentation or the more SWAG definitely 
attracted
more people to the tables. In this case she kept a stocked table 
ensuring that the attraction to the Fedora table continued.

    Julie also noted that the facility did not provide enough trash 
receptacles throughout the venue. To get to a trash can we either had to
  leave the area or go to the other side where there was one trash can 
which half was dedicated to recycling materials.

    Some of the questions that were asked about Fedora were quite common 
and some were not so obvious. For some people changing from
what they are already using is not an easy task, but for others 
seamless. There were a few questions that concerned me but I believe 
they were
answered. The most difficult question to answer came about the back 
support of previous releases. They did not want to be tied to a 12 month
or so required upgrade. I pointed them out to our website and towards 
fedup. The biggest concern was the moving of data back and forth to satisfy
new loads of the O/S. That seems to be the main concern of the faithful 
users of Fedora I spoke with. They were for the most part unaware that they
did not need to keep moving data off the machine, but of course I 
recommended a back up prior to executing just to be safe. There were 
more than
the fair share of “why should I change from my current O/S 
(Debian,Ubuntu) to Fedora”? We did our best to answer everyone of those 
why should I
use Fedora questions, but even those hardcore other distribution people 
still picked up one of our Multimedia Dvd's, funny how that works.

    One person during this event stood out with a few questions. A man 
from the western part of Kentucky wanted to know if we could give him a
few multimedia DVD's so that he could bring them home to his part of the 
state. He was a local television broadcaster (media personality) with the
local TV station in his area. He also asked that if he contacted us 
would we be willing to send him more of the DVD's. He proceeded to tell 
me why.
This person was trying to get his community involved with some new ideas 
in computing. There has been a lot of job loss in his area and a lot of
really down people trying to get out of and try some new ideas for jobs, 
hobbies, and skills. I was more than happy to aide him in is request.
He also asked if there were to be an event scheduled in his area would 
we as Fedora be willing to attend (invited). I let him know that we could
surely ask when the time came to make the invite for Fedora through the 
website or get a hold of an Ambassador to get the request on the schedule.
This may turn into a good opportunity to distribute more and help others 
learn about Linux.

    We had a lot more than usual stop by and tell us how much they loved 
Fedora. We kept getting compliments all day long about how Fedora has
been such a great Operating System for them. That was quite pleasing to 
hear. This was a very successful event for Fedora. I am looking
forward to going again next year to Ohio Linux Fest.






-- 
Andrew Ward
award3535 at fedoraproject.org
award3535 at tds.net
award3535 at gmail.com