Publicity

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:43:27AM -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-08-28 at 13:00 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > Chris,
> > 
> > I think you asked earlier -- although I can't seem to put my hands on
> > the specific email -- about how widely to publicize FUDCon.  (At least
> > I'll be splitting this thread out now, hope that helps.)  You noted
> > that there might be as many as several hundred students interested in
> > attending, and I think you were concerned that might overwhelm our
> > ability to provide effective event support.
> > 
> > We could limit the need to provide limitless funding if we do one or
> > more of the following:
> > 
> > * Limit gifts (T-shirt, FUDPub coverage) to a pre-arranged number of
> >   pre-registrants.
> > 
> > * Seek sponsorship from one or more places.  Seneca is already giving
> >   us free facilities so I'm loath to go there, but perhaps the user
> >   education track gives us a way to seek sponsorship elsewhere.
> > 
> > A further thought about Point #1: Running the pre-registration process
> > through the wiki works tolerably well and requires little effort on
> > our part, but it's not going to be easy for planning technical
> > sessions.  We may need to find and set up conference management
> > somewhere on Fedora infrastructure.
> 
> Paul,
> 
> This is the direction I'm going:
> 
> * Promoting FUDCon to the smaller number of students who are strongly
> plugging into the project as contributors, such as my Build & Release
> students (i.e., have a FAS2 account, using bugzilla, on IRC, etc).
> 
> * Encouraging other students not to register online but to attend the
> barcamp day on Saturday. This will relieve pressure on the t-shirt &
> FUDPub expenses if they are restricted to registered attendees. (OTOH,
> maybe I should get them to sign up somewhere -- perhaps on the Seneca
> wiki -- so we do have a count for room-size purposes).

These both sound reasonable to me.  We do want to make sure we can
populate the "user track" that will consist of kinder, gentler
getting-started info, so we really are bringing as much of the 'U'
into FUDCon this time around as possible.

I think we can plan to have a low-cost giveaway available for everyone
regardless of registration -- stickers, buttons, or what have you.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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