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).

Procedure:

1. Find a date.
The date of your party should be during a weekend (because it’s easier for people to join, since most people work during the week). Prefer to have your party during the morning. People from outside your city want to join the party and they have to travel to your city and back home. If you discuss with the members of your community about the date, you have to find 2 alternative dates for the party since you have to find the place for the party (see below), so if the owners of the place do not allow you your first date, then use the alternative. A good tool to find common dates is http://www.doodle.com/.

2. Place of the party
If you have the 2 alternative dates, you have to find the cafe-bar, the place that will host your party. As I said above, you should have 2 alternative dates, so when you ask them if they’re OK to host your party and they refuse, you can propose them the second date. The location of the place should be at the center of your city (unless there’s a special place at the suburbs). If people from outside your city want to join the party, it’s easier for them to reach the place. Regarding the place, if you think that you can make deals for better prices of the drinks, it’s up to you. It’s not your concern what they will order. It’s best if the place serves coffee, beer, soft drinks. If someone is hungry, there should be soft food. Finally, background music is OK.

3. Promotion
* Your first task is to create a poster for the party. Be creative. Try to make the poster funny. The information you should have is TITLE/DATE/TIME/LOCATION (address)/CONTACT (mail or phone number). Regarding the location, if it’s easy for you, put a QR code, so they can see it on maps. Try to find a proper hashtag to use for facebook, google plus and twitter.

* Write a blog post at community’s blog and ask members of your community to take the text-pictures and write a post at their blogs (preferably different days). If those blogs are registered to planets, many people will read about your party.

* If your community-project has a global place where to add your party, go and add it. See some examples at openSUSE or GNOME. * Create a facebook event and invite as many people as you can. Remember, less than 1/3 that replied yes, will finally come.

* Create a google plus event and invite also as many people as you can. Ask people to invite their friends.

* Tweet your facebook and google plus events and encourage members of your community to retweet. Also try to tweet regularly about your release party. Don’t forget to use the hashtags.

* Send mails to ALL mailing lists about your party (text, poster and social media event pages). Send mails to all distros-GUIs-projects mailing lists. Although there are other channels the users can learn about your release party, you want them to join and celebrate with you, so they don’t have excuse that you didn’t invite them.

* Post to forums about your party (text, poster and social media event pages). Don’t forget to add the option to receive a notification if someone reply, asking questions. Again try to do the same. Post it to ALL distros-GUIs-projects forums, so they’ll celebrate with you.

4. Cake
Although it’s not necessary to have a cake (because it costs), it’s sweet to have one. Order it from your favorite patisserie. Ask-order them to print the logo of your project on the cake. Also choose your favorite flavor of the cake. According to my experience a 2kgr cake is OK for most parties. In my country costs about 30Euros. Since we’re volunteers and we’re doing our “hobby”, we pay for the cake. If the team has more than one person, it’s easier to cover the amount. If there’s only one person it’s normal if he/she doesn’t have a cake. When you’re going to get the cake, ask them if they have candles (if it’s not similar to the version number of your project, 1 candle is OK). Also buy from a market, plastic plates and forks/spoons. You’re going to use plastic plates to serve the cake.

5. 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. Also remember to make people laugh. After the “serious” picture, ask them to give you their silly face. We’re bored being serious.

6. Swag
I mentioned above that you should gather the people to talk for social event and not presentation. It would be nice to give them swag. The only “promo material” that it’s hard for you to have is PromoDVDs (if your distro still sends DVDs). For some countries it’s hard to have PromoDVDs after the release. Order them from the marketing channels, they produce the right amount of DVDs, send them to your country. It might take you 1-2 months after the official release to have the original PromoDVDs. Although everyone can download the new version from the Internet, people like to have an original version of the DVD. Regarding Live Media, you can have some empty DVDs and the ISO files. If someone asks for a DVD, you can burn one. If someone asks for a live USB, you can also make his.

7. Social Media during the party.
It sounds nasty, I know. There are people that didn’t make it to your party. They’re interested to know what’s happening. You can have ONLY one laptop (the same laptop can create the live DVD/USB). The person in charge, update your twitter, facebook, google plus with short messages (don’t forget hashtags) and also with pictures. Ask members of the community from outside your city to repost those messages (with the right hashtags). Try to keep the IRC informed as well.
Another cool thing to do is a google hangout (maybe set it up with your youtube channel). This is the easiest way to have your party brodacast live. To do so, you should have a web camera (not your laptop’s) and mute your speakers (leave the mic on).

8. Aftermath, afterparty, after after…
You had a successful party. People MUST know about it. Write a report (even short one) at your community’s blog. Use the uploaded pictures and 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).

IMPORTANT TIP: Most of the release parties of FOSS projects attract male members. So even if a woman wants to join the party, she’s afraid or bored to come (or any other reason). So try to find women to join you, even if they don’t use Open Source. Where you can find them? At your university, ask your friends, ask your family, ask your friends to bring their girlfriends etc. They’ll come to drink a coffee or a beer and eat cake. They won’t learn how to compile code.

Ambassador, Panama, openSUSE

This event did open a collaboration between communities , enterprises and Universidad Interamericana de Panama to promote open source  and Linux certifications and Linux diplomados.

All open source communities ambassadors will organize their groups looking to keep their members up to date with knowledge.

Some CAPATEC (Cámara Panameña de Tecnología) members, like ELCONIX, has showed higher intention to support  some Open Source communities sponsoring education, certification, and some events like FLISoL and Freedom Software Day.

Mirtha Rodriguez, UIP,  Systems Engineering Faculty Dean, did give us a great liaison and invited us to keep working with their students at UIP for future events.

]]> https://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/07/21/lrl-uk-08-not-the-last/ https://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/07/21/lrl-uk-08-not-the-last/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:08:27 +0000 http://lizards.opensuse.org/?p=108 So LUG Radio Live UK is over for another year, yes the event will be back next year but not the podcast.  openSUSE were represented by yours truly and Roger Whittaker (also representing the Big N), and to be honest I didn’t have to get my baseball bat out once to get people to come by – I was slightly disappointed with that as knocking some sense into some of those Ubuntu zombies would have been fun   Part of the reason may have been the fact that the Furry Geekos were out in force

Roger also did a sterling job of getting the new openSUSE 11.0 Live/Installable DVD into almost all the “NutSacks” (The bags attendees received when entering the event).  Those that didn’t get one in there pretty quickly came over to ensure they did get one.  Everyone agreed that we had the best mascot and the best swag, talking of which can anyone guess what this is?

Only a few folk were lucky enough to get one, and to be honest it is a much better one than what RedHat/Fedora were dishing out.  It is of course a USB stick

Another piece of openSUSE swag that was being dished out but not by us was the Linux Magazine openSUSE 11.0 Special.  This is actually quite a good issue and is a great companion for anyone new to the distro.  I have a couple that I can send to people (UK/Europe preferably due to cost) if requested.  The issue was created aimed predominantly at the US market where Linux Magazine is trying to get a foot hold:

Wandering around, I spoke to quite a lot of people about Linux in general and openSUSE and the feedback from people was tremendous.  Those that have actually tried 11.0 really really like it, and those that haven’t were adamant that they would.  So much so that one rather intimidating chap mentioned that “A friend of mine needed to re-install her machine and she was very scared of the process, I gave her a DVD of 10.3 and told her to ring me if she was stuck.  She rang me a short while later and exclaimed at how easy and straight forward it was.  She hasn’t looked back since!” The praise also came from a fair few die hards of other distros, which was pleasant to see and hear.  There was a friendly swag exchange with RedHat and Fedora, although their offering was pretty poor in comparison but still better than Ubuntu who had nothing but a type of crummy sticker and a million and one CDs of assorted variants of the same crud   The Fedora guys took it upon themselves to try and sully the image and spirit of our beloved Geeko by hanging it by one of their lanyards

Thankfully the kind chaps from Debian rescued it, although I’m pretty sure it was for their own gains.  The atmosphere was light hearted and pleasent with no trolls in sight or in earshot.  This even extended to my lightning talk which was pretty well attended, around 30 people almost none of which were involved with openSUSE in any way.  You can get my slides here, and there will be a video of it shortly.

All in all it was a fairly good weekend, and from an openSUSE perspective a very productive one   I would like to thank Roger for his hard work in doing the stand, helping out and support as well as for the photos (some of which I used here).  I would also like to thank Zonker and Novell for arranging for the brilliant swag and DVDs, without which we could have looked like dull dorks.  Till next year!