Re: Conference Booth Organization

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:49:19AM -0700 or thereabouts, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> Notes for GNOME booths
...
> 5) "Spiel type thing".  Computer folks tend to be shy as a breed... 
> This applies to both the attendees of the conference, as well as the
> folks manning the GNOME booth.  We need to have some thoughts about how
> to get started talking to the people who come by about all the cool
> stuff in GNOME.

"Want a go?" and offering someone the mouse has worked well for
me. No joke. 

> Sorry this turned out so long, but I'd love to get to the point where
> GNOME has a booth that looks as good as the ones for the big companies
> who show up, instead of looking like it was thrown together at the last
> minute.  

Brilliant list. One that worked well for us on the second day of
a two-day Linux awareness event here at the weekend was

* if you have multiple machines with different things, big label
of stiff card (ideally) which can be affixed to the top of the 
monitor saying what that box is demonstrating. We had things like 
"Ximian desktop on Red Hat", "Linux yn Gymraeg", "Gnome desktop
on Debian", "CDs burned here!", "Multimedia". 

Oh yes. If you really want to show off Nautilus, even if the
box is straight from an install, have a tarball (or CD?) of
a directory of the sort of thing people have in their files:
some (legit :)) music and mpeg files, a .doc, a pdf or two,
a collection of photos, and so on.

Otherwise you get "So. What we have here is your folder. And
erm... well. If there were image files here you would see a
small image there, um, but well, there isn't. Um."

Saves you trying to remember where pretty pictures or sound
files live on a system!

So perhaps a CD of 'sample files' should go in your booth
kit too? 

Telsa