Fedora Boot for LWCE:SF

[Jesse Keating]

Now that FUDCon2 is over, and we've pretty much decided to not have a
FUDCon3 in SF can we put some serious resources into planning the Fedora
Booth for LWCE:SF?

We've had a couple booths under our belts now, and I think it's time for
us to progress beyond the 'tossed together last minute' feel of the
booths that I've seen.  Not to take away from any great effort that
booth people have put in in the past, just having a booth is an amazing
amount of work.  But with more and more people willing to help out I
think we have the opportunity to do a bit more.

Having some systems in the booth is good, having them DO SOMETHING is
even better.  Since we're not going to have any FUDCon talks, I thought
doing some mini presentations in the booth using the systems might be a
good way to draw some people over and show them what it really is.

Personally, I'd love to do a mini talk on kickstart complete with a
system being kickstarted.  By the same token somebody (or myself) can do
a talk in just regular installs because I feel that the installer is one
of the best parts of the distribution, and it is unique.  Rather than
talking about 'and this is how the new openoffice.org looks on OUR
distro!  See the widgets!?' we can talk about what really sets the
distribution aside.

In past LWCEs I've been to, the majority of the crowd are 'why would we
use your distro' and not 'how can we contribute to your distro', so I
think pitching our mini-presentations toward _users_ and if they proceed
to ask about contribution, then we can have side discussions about
contribution.  Maybe we could score a little round table or something so
that people that want to talk contribution and project stuff can sit
down and take a load off instead of stacking up in front of the booth
and blocking the way for people that want to take a look at the shinys.

I also think we should have a good diversity of arches represented, an
Intel box, an AMD box (dual cores anybody?), I'll have my Apple laptop
but maybe a mac mini would be cool for the table.  I'd like to do what
some other booths have done, have one system (or maybe all systems w/ a
switcher) plugged into a projector and the projector projecting on the
back wall of the booth or the corner of the booth or something like that
so that people bring their eyes up and look ahead instead of stooping to
look at table level monitors or whatnot.  It could also free table space
for systems instead of having a bunch of (heavy) monitors stacked up.

Of course, there is the swag aspect too.  I assume we'll have t-shirts
galore again (do they HAVE to be white?), CDs or DVDs of the distro
(maybe we can ping vendors again for vendor branded ones rather than
paying to master them ourselves), but what about some higher class items
for the people that have a sit down talk about contributing (maybe even
an extras contributor account sign up kiosk)?  We won't advertise the
items so that we don't get freeloaders just faking a talk to get swag,
but for those that have a genuine interest we can give them something to
thank them for their time?

Anywho, these are my thoughts for now, I'm sure I'll have more soon.
I'd like to start a wiki page for the booth planning, anybody have a
preference where this page goes?

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (http://geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (http://www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key
(http://geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

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