Re: Conference Booth Organization

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 06:09, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

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

It can also be good -- depending on the demographics of the visitors to
the booth -- to show some task oriented demos...

"We'll open a document produced in MS Word... let's see, I put the
floppy in the drive and see how the floppy icon appears on the desktop
automatically... I double-click on it and... ah! there we are, there's
the letter, now I'll open it in a word processor... no, don't go away,
it's already running... this one is called AbiWord... notice how it's
preserved formatting.. I'll just print this, would anyone like a flyer
about Gnome?"

Have 3 or 4 simple tasks that each take under 2 minutes... previewing
image files, choosing a music file to listen to, dragging files around
to organise them, zooming in/out of a folder, it's all very useful, and
although you miht think you quickly get bored on the booth, watching
people's reactions and choosing the most apprpriate demos makes it stay
interesting.

Then have a CD to give them, or a flyer.  At some shows you can sell
things -- e.g. books, tee shirts, socks, buttons, Linux distributions
(but don't just haveone distribution of Linux, as that links the two
brands together more than you probably want) -- and that can help defray
the cost of the trade show.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001