1. Read the tech news
Read the news (RSS, social networks, mailing lists). There are many conferences that you can join (some conferences are annual). Unfortunately, the organizers might skip to sent you invitation because you’re either too small project without any marketing section or they forgot you for their reasons. You should contact them and ask them to join as community-project. Most conferences have call for papers period, where you can apply for a presentation.

2. Community Meetings
Now that you made the first contact, you should sent an e-mail to your project mailing list, informing them about the conference and asking for an IRC meeting. At the kick off meeting, someone MUST be the coordinator of everything (the tasks are following). Another thing that should be clear is how many members of the community will join. You have to decide early because you can book your trip and accommodation (if the conference is quite big, there won’t be any rooms available for you). Travel as a team. If you decide early, you can ask for sponsorship, like openSUSE Travel_Support_Program or GNOME Travel sponsorship (GNOME for smaller events).

3. Ideas for the coordinator
Coordinator doesn’t mean that he/she does everything himself/herself. It means that he/she knows everything about the trip and contact the organizers:

* First of all create a wiki page about the event. See some examples at openSUSE or GNOME. Ask members who will join, to write down their name and what materials can bring (even if they’ll have their laptops).

* Contact organizers for the booth. How many people will help at the booth. How many plugs do we need. If there’s a possibility to provide us with projector or monitors or tv.

* Blog post at community’s blog. Re post from members of the community to their personal blogs on different days (we want many people to read it on different days).

* Social media team. Find the conference’s facebook and google plus events and join. If they don’t have, contact them and ask them if it’s OK to create one. Ask members of the community to join the events. Ask members of the community to post everyday something about your project at the social networks event pages (something like: DON’T MISS THE PRESENTATION BY … AT …). Don’t forget to use a hashtag you want for the specific conference (like #project_is_coming). Remember to use also the “normal” hashtag (example #project). Ask members of the community to retweet you.

* Don’t forget to bring a camera. Bring one or more cameras to take pictures or videos. Those pictures will be used for reports (blog posts), upload them to your facebook-google plus groups. Also ask everyone that brought his/her own camera to upload the pictures to your groups or send them directly to you, so you upload them to public place. Don’t forget to take the family picture.

4. Swag for the booth
If you’re lucky and there’s a global project that sponsors your swag, then ask them to send you promo materials. Here comes the coordinator. If the conference is away from your home, then he/she can contact the organizers and the project’s marketing materials coordinator to mail them directly to the organizers’ address. If you want to keep some promo materials for future events, then you can ask them to mail them to your place. Regarding openSUSE, they can sponsor you to create some promo materials yourself with the openSUSE Travel Support Program.
If your project is small and you don’t have enough money to support it, try to have some brochures about it and maybe some promo cd/dvds.
Other promo materials are stickers, posters, T-Shirts, buttons, cubes, caps, plush toys etc.
Here comes the confusion. In my country (Greece), people think the swag is free. On the other hand, they ask us “how the community-project earn money?”. Well, personally, I think someone who wants something should “donate” to project. Unfortunately some countries have strict financial rules and it’s hard to “sell” something unless you give receipt. Well, I won’t analyze this now since it’s out of the scope of this post.

5. We’re at the conference
Tips to remember:

* Try to wear the same T-Shirt, so everyone will know that you’re from the same project and can come talk to you.

* Remember only one person stays behind the table and all the others in front of the table and speak with visitors. It’s better to stay 2 of you in front of the desk so it’ll be easier for the visitor to talk to you and ask than just one person and wait for the visitor to talk to him (it’s psychology). Remember to smile.
Another idea is how to setup your table at the booth. The best solution to have as many visitors as possible is to setup you table behind you, at the wall. That way you’ll have free room to stand and talk with visitors. You’ll make them to pass you to get some swag as well and either you or the visitor can start talking. Also this setup is just like hug someone and make him feel welcomed (thanks to Jos Poortvliet for this tip).

* Visitors like people from the projects to “goofy” around. Try to play games each other or with friends from other projects. Visitors are very bored of serious guys with suits to try to “sell” them products.

* If a smaller project cannot be present with a booth, you can host them at yours. Let them bring their swag. It’ll be cool for visitors to know about their existance and also they’ll talk to you about your project.

* Another cool thing you should do (if the room for the booth is enough), you can organize small talks (10-15 mins each). Make a small schedule and print it. Then go to put it on the wall around the venue. Everyone will notice that you’ll have short presentations and also your project’s logo.

Check out my presentation at openSUSE conference 2012:

Non verbal communication (presentation file)

* It’s prohibited to sit and work at your computer. Visitors aren’t interested on projects with someone watching his laptop screen at the booth. You’re there for a reason. Talk to people. If there’s emergency and you have to chat or reply mails or write code, go to a presentation and do it there. No one will notice.

* Someone should be at the social media. Repost what the official channels post and also do the same if someone from your team is at a presentation and uses his/her social media. That person could be from home (someone didn’t attend) since he/she can view online streaming all the presentations. If the person is at the conference, try to upload the pictures right after the photographer took them.

6. Aftermath, afterparty, after after…
You’re back. What happened? People MUST know about it. Write a report (even short one) at your community’s blog and the wiki page. Use the pictures you took. Send the link to the channels you promoted your party (facebook, google plus, twitter, mailing lists, forums etc) and ask members of your community to repost to their blogs-social media accounts (on a different days).



Was a real pleasure to meet so numerous openSUSE users.

If running a booth is, for sure, an investment of time, energy and money (even if TSP contribute to help you), We often forget to say
how much it’s important for our community and project.

Booths makes openSUSE alive in all open source events! and it’s a great experience to live, for any of us.

Feel the beat!

I strongly believe that openSUSE has be to visible on events like KDE Akademy, Scale, Fosdem, Guadec.
It’s not a question of "Bang for the buck", than a simple obviousness:

• Fosdem : the biggest open source event in Europe (perhaps in the world) with more than 5000 hackers visiting.
• Scale : biggest event in North America with more than 3000 attendees
• Guadec : The annual conference of Gnome Hackers with lot of worldwide attendees
• KDE Akademy : This year with around 150 active contributors coming from all over the world.

The obviousness is: if openSUSE has no booth there, you just see Ubuntu and Redhat, and let’s add Debian, Mageia etc for Fosdem or Scale.


You all know how much I like our Geeko community. And when Akademy staff proposed us to run a booth, I said yes, great I will be there!
After comparing ways to go to Brno, the Geeko’s car was the less expensive, and allow me to pick the demo touch screen at SUSE Headquarter.
So I took a full week off and drive 2000 kilometers to make it happens.

Open the Fun can

Running a booth is not that hard. You will find flyers in the booth box presenting openSUSE and related tools.
There’s goodies like several kind of stickers, pens, USB flash keys, beer mate.
About the poster, if not allowed on walls, let’s your creativity soar. Use boxes, a pen can also fix that big banner around the guard-rail.

On the human part, I would say than 3 persons is not too much. For example at Brno, the booth was very calm during the talks, but when the break
arrives, you just see 30-50 people coming all at the same time in your direction.Don’t run away!
Organize yourself! For example one of the staff is delegated to spread swag, and drive attendees to the next expert.

Try to give as much as possible short-quality answers.

No matter if you are not at all technical guru, the priority is to welcome visitors and listen to them.

If you have a demo computer, organize a bunch of bookmarks related to the conference subject inside the openSUSE community.
At Brno, we were essentially demoing live factory with kde stable 4.14 and Factory with plasma5 and Frameworks 5, and all related web pages about kde on obs, wiki.
Our moto was What openSUSE can offer to KDE developers and contributors.

It’s rarely on a booth that we can resolve a bug, but that’s where a beginning of a social interaction starts.

Don’t worry if you can’t awnser directly, offer a visit card, try to write down the contact details and its related question.
You will, once the event is done, follow-up the contact with precious data, that will be really useful.

Beat the Green next on stage

As any other contribution, running a booth is an awesome experience.
It’s the best way to meet users and potential contributors.
It’s always an opportunity to evolve, a challenge to be done and an experience to share.

Back home, as usual a lot of things to do. But I feel important to share this experience in this lizard article, to post a few pictures, to share my
feeling with my fellow openSUSE community. I hope to see more of you, taking the challenge to run one, next to your location.
Do it, just run an openSUSE booth. You will learn a lot about you and our fellows, share with outcomers and meet others communities.

My final words are a big Thank you people who ran booth in the past,
and I encourage all of you still hesitating.

See you soon on stage!

More pictures available at: openSUSE booth KDE Akademy photo album

Again this year, Fosdem was really delightful, a bit crowdy as hell concerning a number of conference rooms.

But if there’s a constant, it is the awesomeness of the Fosdem staff and its armada of volunteers. Please all of you who made this event so great, receive in the name of openSUSE’s community our warmest thanks and congratulations.

I will not make a mistake if I predict a big success for the different talk’s videos, in the next following weeks.

openSUSE merchandising new collection

After a loooong wait, perceived as a century, openSUSE Booth was furbished with the next generation of merchandising stuff.

At least some part of the complete kit, which should be available in April.

The new design & branding ideas

This was the first public showing of the new posters & goodies design. The basis of the design appear first during HackWeek’10


this Geeko’s was put on pullover I’m still looking where I can grab one, so take care of yours if you own one

Posters

We got three kind of new posters, and one block-note. I would like to thanks booth’s helpers for spreading them on almost any Fosdem’s building free walls.

Discover it – Bulb A2

With elegant dark green and white symbol on big format, it won the heart’s public.
Several of them were offered.

Block-note meeting or communication papers A3

Useful on a booth to pick feedback, announce something in an fashionned way.
I hope we will have the A4 format too.

Stickers

Geeko’s stickers

Appreciated and adopted by fans, and the public. The size is perfect.

We still get a number of request to have some with transparent background, which would allow them as perfect decoration for any kind of devices.

Geeko’s keyboard patch stickers

We’ve got a very limited edition of Geeko’s keyboard patch stickers. For the first time, you will have pleasure to press the meta key.
They literally create a rush on the booth, we save some to patch our demonstration computer with them.

I predict a long and successful life to this article. I hope future booth box will contain thousand of them.

Table covers

Done in synthetic material, colored with a beautiful green and proudly displaying the openSUSE logo. They are light resistant flexible.

Excellent article.

As there’s 2 models, one with big Geeko on top and the other one having openSUSE written on bottom front, they can’t be use for the same mission.
What impact would have one with the big Geeko sitting on the front with just one openSUSE? We should have some others shoot to be sure to get the best model.

Flag (alpha testing)

We also got a kind of flag, in an alpha-state, we fixed it on top of an official SUSE roll-up.

I’m still not sure how to use this one. As a stand-up like the open-mind poster, the who’s behind the message is bottom placed which
is always a bit hidden if placed on a roll-up.
As a flag, the holes are missing to use it on different kind of support.

Flyer & brochure

The cheat sheet encounter a big success, using the other side to present key related tools (obs, openqa, susestudio) allow people on booth to introduce them or talk about it.

There’s a number of commands that need to be removed from it (obsolete or deprecated way of doing things)

Flyer, even with the printing default and small shift in the bulb, find their audience.

openSUSE DVD by Open Press

We received finally 1400 DVD of the Open Press’s edition containing Live KDE / Gnome 64 bits. We spread out 1000 of them, 200 were split between Advocates for future events in Austria, Spain and Greece.

openSUSE conference cube box & penguins

Those two articles were unfortunately a failure at Fosdem booth. They are over complicated to build, and need too much material (scissors, glue) and too much time (15 minutes pro piece)

They should have been used to advertise the conference, but are not practical, once assembled they took too much place. Same on printed material, A3 is too big for any bags.

Croatian team bring a lot of them to use them locally. If we want to keep those kind of article for booth the printed result should be perforated and you should able to build the object with only your ten fingers in less than a minute.

Missing parts

I can’t be satisfied with what we received, our booth look so poor compared to what we usually present to the public.

Don’t forget those article can be sold

• t-shirts : where are our fancy and inspiriting t-shirts?
• usb sticks
• Pens
• Pins
• hat
• plush : so beloved
• Old Toad bottles (*)

(*) About our Old Toad beer, I’ve explained to people that nothing is impossible if and only if the community will assume the responsibility about managing the stock, carrying the boxes, and drink or sell the minimal order in less than 6 months. We’ll see if a Old Toad Team appear soon.

Computers

Just a small remark, our two touchscreen computers (only one has accepted to come at Fosdem) start to show their age.

First part conclusion

I will conclude this article which was more oriented on the new marketing stuff. There’s still quite works to be 100% useful and successful. I will come back soon with another article with some thoughts about how openSUSE booth has worked and details we could improve in the future

Thanks for your reading, comments & feedback are open!

We had a very nice booth, large and at a nice place. We had the chance to tell lots of people about openSUSE and where it is heading to. I heard much good feedback, about the distribution on the one hand, but also for the project and how it evolves. Slowly we seem to get a good message out and users and peers from the FOSS community get and appreciate it. Very good to experience that.

Of course we also had good fun at the booth andgave some interesting workshops in pipe cleaner arts and grafity for example.

Some other specific things that stick to my mind:

I went to a talk about Icinga, a system for open source monitoring. A very good talk about an obviously great system with a very awake community. Good to see the hands on approach of them. Interestingly enough, after the talk somebody asked why they did choose PHP as programming language instead of something cool like rails. I could not resist to tell about that at least I often thought about if it hadn’t been better to do the OBS in PHP instead of Rails simply because more people know it. Not appreciated

Another talk I liked was the fly over Qt and its recent past and future, delivered by Daniel Molkentin. Thoughts about Qt 5 were published a few weeks ago and Danimo outlined these again, also showing some nice demos of the upcoming Qt Quick and more.

From Vincent I saw a very good talk about collaboration between distros where he came up with an impressive list of activities where we’re already collaborate and proposals for more. Sad to see only few people in the audience. I missed Vincents other one about GNOME 3, but there is a nice Interview with him done at LT about that topic.

Apart from talks I saw KDE Active the first time real on a kind of Weetab on the KDE booth. Definetely cool, hopefully applications will catch up and being ported to this kind of platform. I am sure users will seek out for more than weather forecast apps sooner or later.

On saturday a collegue from the Gentoo Project approached me and told me that his team is actively working on a Smolt feature to also track the list of installed software of a system. We also use Smolt in openSUSE and we also have Feature #305877 asking for that kind of functionality, so I think we should jump on that train to support that effort. Nice idea, volunteers welcome!

Yes, and there also was some sports on Linuxtag: The Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik had a booth and were giving workshops on lock picking. I attended, but was not successful so far, need more practising

Apart from that I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by this years LinuxTag. I had the feeling that the number of visitors did not meet the expectations of the most exibitors and presenters. The hallways were really relaxed most of the time. Furthermore, the number of not so impressive talks I saw was comparably high. The official numbers however do not support my feeling, so maybe I am wrong.

Anyway it was big fun again. I like to thank you all for your share which made Linuxtag 2011 a great success for openSUSE.