Re: OSCON

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

On 01/29/2012 02:16 AM, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:

I manned the GNOME booth at OSCON for 3 years.  It just seems that the
participants there are not really interested in Linux desktops in
general.  They are all cloud/web apps type of people.

The best booths are the ones that engage people passing by.

That is totally correct, that's why I didn't want a booth where we just sat around passively.  We want to show something, do something whatever it is.  Of course, those kind of booths required preparation and planning.  :-)
 

I had a few ideas but they may be way out there... could be cool for OSCON, though.

1. Croud-source something we need that isn't getting done
 - The classic example was last year, there's a project aiming to create audio learning materials to go along with words and images. They have English down pretty well, but could use others. I can't remember the name, unfortunately... I suggested that they could set up a recording booth, and take advantage of the international make-up of the audience to get recordings of different languages. It becomes a demo of their tools, and an opportunity to get contributions at the same time.

I like the idea.  I'm trying to think of how we could fit that in, in a GNOME booth.  The only only thing I could think of is to show off the a11y have a screen reader or some other device hooked up and people try to use the desktop using those devices with appropriate handicaps of course.


 

OpenStreetMap does something similar, hosting mapping parties in the evening after conferences in places where they have booths.

Yeah, I remember that from last OSCON. :)
 

Do we have something where we could engage the public and get material we could use later? Translations? Mallard docs? Something where we can show a checklist and see everything going to green as people do the work during the conference would be cool!

2. Interactive demo booths
 - Something like a coding competition, where on Day 1, you pair people off to write a Shell extension to do the same thing as a bake-off, the winners do something else on day 2, and on day 3 you have the final. I haven't thought this through fully, but the fact that you can write shell extensions in JS should appeal to the web & cloud crowd, no?

The thing here is that marketing doesn't really want to focus on extensions so much.  We want to sell the original design.  The extensions are kind of a "get out of jail" and let people extend the desktop or allow designers to try out new stuff.  But the marketing team themselves are not going to be pushing it in an official capacity.

However, showing off gobject-introspection and how we can easily get bindings instantly by writing a gobject C library and have that immediately show up in all the bindings.  I think that is NEAT stuff and is worth talking about.  Vala also is neat to talk about.
 

3. Some way to follow through
 - My experience of GNOME booths is that we rarely have a call to action for after the conference. We don't collect email addresses for a newsletter, or ask people to do anything in particular. It'd be nice if we used contact with a highly technical audience as an opportunity to get some new contributors. What might that be? Signing up Friends of GNOME might be a start, but also having some way to sign people up for an announce mailing list (not paper & pen! No-one ever types all that in again - either a form that stores contact details in a Mailman compatible batch subscription format, or a proper connection to the announce mailing list, and a follow-up afterwards with a call to engage)

I think signing up for FoG is a great idea, but the other bits is might raise privacy concerns and secondly we have to actually have a process to do something with those email addresses.  Clearly, we can't just add htem to a mailing list.  I know personally I would not like to have my email spammed like that.

 

The booth would have to be focused on applications or integration with
cloud, a11y, or online services to get traction IMHO.  A booth for the
sake of just showing a GNOME desktop is not very inspiring or useful.

Web APIs and cloud/online services sounds like a great focus!

Yeah, I thinking integration is always a great thing.  I know as a corporate user, I would love to show people how a GNOME desktop can neatly fit as a valuable resource in a corporate network.

Thanks for putting that out there, Dave.
sri

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com

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