Summary of my participation in startup mixer in portland

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

So, as part of engagement outside the free software circle, I started
going to calagator and looking up events that I can attend to ask the
question "what are people creating?"

The mixer was interesting, nobody knew about Free Software or GNOME.
Which was awesome because now I had to figure out how to actually talk
about GNOME and Free Software and why we are important.  I sucked.  I
need to come out with some talking points.  I think I did okay, but it
could definitely gone better.

As to what people are working on, there was a lot of work on web
sites.  For instance, one person was working on a travel website.  A
lot of people didn't really talk about anything they were making or
working on, they already had jobs not startups.  But they did all seem
interested in what I was doing.  I had a chance to show off the
desktop a little bit and talk about the philosophy behind it.

I didn't do any marketing though or anything like that.  Sometimes the
best marketing is being enthusiastic about what you're working on, and
in an atmosphere like this that is what catches people's attention.  I
had one business person who was interested in donating his time to a
charity and hoping that he might reach out to us.

So key learnings:

1) we need to explain GNOME to someone who doesn't know anything about
GNOME or Free Software.. we had talked about a 30 second elevator
pitch at teh engagmeent BOF.  It might be nice to formulate something
that I could use and laminate it in my wallet. :-)

2) These things are important.  It exposes our brand outside our
sphere of influence.  It's important to show our culture and community
at these events.

3) We need more people doing it here in the U.S. and in Europe.  In
fact, I think someone like Christian Hergert would be amazing at this
in SFO.  Christian already has the charisma and enthusiasm to talk
with people and get them interested.  Perhaps some part of his time in
September onward would be to do exactly what I'm doing.  What do you
think, Christian?

There is another one next week, so I'll probably hitting that.  This
weekend is Techfest Northwest, sort of the northwest version fo SXSW.
Unfortunately I didn't track it.   I might try to attend it, depending
on how much it costs.  (I don't plan on asking for foundation funds
for this)

sri