Re: Booth space for LWE New York.

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Jan 01, 2001 at 05:41:54PM -0500 or thereabouts, Ariel Rios wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Jan 2001, Nat Friedman wrote:
> > Yup. We can help with this.  Furnitures and computers are no problem.  Where do the gnome t shirts come from?
> The FSF provide the tshirts that are provided by copyleft (I think)
> That makes me wonder if we are going to share this big booth space as
> usual. Also, we usually sell the tshirts and the money goes for the
> FSF. What are we going to do know? 
> 
> I have also thought if we could have some brochures or something
> to give away showing what's GNOME, etc

Fliers. 

I've said this before, I think. I can't find it in the archives, though,
si here are highlights (aka, "edited bits which might still be relevant")
from that post, which was made after LinuxTag in Europe.

Note. LinuxTag is a conference. I hear LWE is more of a trade show. So
some of this may want to go more towards the freebies and filling people's
pockets with swag. I dunno. I do think pieces of paper with lists of
user resources, developer resources and "what's a good book for GTK
programming?" (I was asked about Linux programming in general at
LinuxTag, too) is something we sorely missed. The printing is a lot
cheaper than burning CDs, too! :) 

<begin paste>
Suggestions for anyone doing something similar in future:

        o Have people who can explain the technical stuff there. Definitely.
    Really useful.

        o Have CDs to sell/give away if at all possible. In Europe, "you
    can download it from the net" is not always a solution people like
    (unless you're in Scandinavia where everyone appears to have massive
    bandwidth) because of connectivity and bandwidth issues so it's
    doubly important there.

        o Have fliers of lists of resources. Really important. Things
    like gnotices, maybe, but also developer.gnome.org, locations of
    tutorials on GTK and Glade, how to check gnome-hello out of CVS,
    and where people can read and subscribe to development mailing lists.
    (Those are all things I remember explaining and wishing we had fliers
    for.) We didn't have fliers, but I suspect if we'd had them we'd have
    gone for user-aimed ones, and it was tutorial and docs locations we'd
    have needed.

        o Something cute and furry to sell :) I think we should have
    penguins and BSD daemons with large GNOME feet attached to them, but
    I'm weird :) Seriously, people were even asking for posters, and we
    needed those. (Several people remarked on the GUADEC posters and
    thought them supremely cool.) Squeaky rubber gnomes might work,
    especially after you have made someone giggle with the squeaky
    gnome easter egg in the control centre. I was amazed how much people
    liked that, even though we had no speakers and thus no squeak!
    
        o If you have posters of screenshots, make them less complicated
    than we did. Several people stared at them and just looked baffled.
    The ones we had were things like gnumeric-bonobo with about eight
    things inside, and although someone used to GNOME could go "oh, that's
    Dia, and look that must be a game embedded in, and..", but someone not
    used to it would not even be able to separate which windows were which.
    Actually, grabbing the ones of gnome.org's screenshots or a similar
    idea would work: get a range from basic "what it looks like when
    started" to more complicated ones, but have captions to explain what's
    so _cool_ about complicated ones.

        o Similarly, _don't_ pile all the apps onto one screen for demos!
    Use virtual screens, workspaces, shade unused windows, etc. People
    can focus on one thing at a time, then. I really think this is
    important. And if anyone wants a demonstration of why, remind me when
    we meet in person, and I can show you something we were subjected to
    in psychie nurse training, which _really_ makes you appreciate the
    problem of too many stimuli :) I know this sounds silly, but I did
    find people could get confused if you just opened a dozen things at
    them. A better solution is to get _them_ to use the mouse anyway :)
    Oh: one app I think is really cute to leave running, btw, is gtop,
    cos it has flashing lights and a changing display, so just looks
    impressive :) Blinkenlights!
    
        o Something to impress Windows people, or people who are new
    to X, which would be sweet: have a machine running latest stable
    stuff, have one with the development stuff on, and demonstrate the
    X thing of starting apps (or entire sessions) from a remote machine
    with the results on your window. People new to UNIX and X have _no
    idea_ that such things are possible: the networking aspects are
    a totally new concept to them and they are awed by this. This would
    take a little more setting up, I imagine, but it might be worth it.

        o If someone asks "So, what can I do with this?" find out what
    they _want_ to do. Basic, I know :) First lesson of support, too, I
    believe! But it's pointless demo'ing the pretties of Nautilus to
    someone who uses X as a mechanism to open up six xterms and an emacs
    -- although they might want the details of how nautilus works... :)
    But they will sit and play with Glade for half an hour quite happily.
    
<end paste>

Again, that was all from a show which surprised me in the number of
developer questions. If LWE is less techy stuff then you perhaps don't
need people who can walk others through glade and instead the remote
X/Gnome stuff would be good to set up; the single app per workspace
and not horribly complicated screenshots is worth remembering; and
pieces of paper with lists of resources rather that expensive-to-produce 
gimmicks can probably be given to many more people :) 

(Don't just put "www.gnome.org, developer.gnome.org" if you can avoid
it: things like specific URLs to the FAQs, the gtk tutorials, the gb
pages, the pygnome stuff, and lists of books with publishers, dates
and ISBNs as well as "name of book" are more what I'm thinking of,
with one-lines summaries for each.)

Telsa