Merchandise and publicity packs for conferences

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi all,

This might not be something which comes under the remit of the marketing list
(if so, shout), but something which seems to me to be a huge need right now for
GNOME is some kind of merchandising agreement. I know that the board were
working on something like this last year, and I don't know what stage they are
at so perhaps it's more their job, but it seems to me that it would be
relatively simple to partner up with some online geekshop, licence various
GNOME designs to them, and click-through from gnome.org to their site.

The reseller would take care of shipping and payment details, the GNOME
Foundation would get a cut of the profits, and as part of the agreement we
could have a number of t-shirts printed and delivered to people presenting
GNOME stuff at conferences as another way of getting local revenues.

The second thing that we really need is to have some standard poster designs
which people can print out onto glossy A2 paper for conferences. Recently, I
was at a conference (presenting the GIMP), and there was a GNOME stand there.
Unfortunately, the guys didn't have any publicity materials at all - here's a
photo of the stand: http://alphonso.dyndns.org/gallery/JDLL2004/img_2901
Compare to the OpenOffice stand across the way:
http://alphonso.dyndns.org/gallery/JDLL2004/img_2902 and here (on the left)
http://alphonso.dyndns.org/gallery/JDLL2004/img_2899 (you don't see it from
this angle, but behind the pillar on the left there was a big OpenOffice
poster, and in the middle there were a series of Fact Sheets for people to
take). This stand was not set up by Sun, by the way, but by a number of people
involved in migrating the French ministry for the Interior from MS Office to
OOo.

So - I think that we need to do some FireFox type work on branding, and make
sure that whenever people are setting up a GNOME stand that we hear about it,
perhaps get some money off Tim to pay for a certain amount of printing of fact
sheets, posters and (when we have them) GNOME liveCDs. We should definitely
solicit help for this from Novell, RedHat and Sun, since having GNOME shown in
a bad light at LUG held events like this is definitely not good for them.

What do people think (at least on the posters and fact sheets idea)?

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
Lyon, France