2008-Zurich
The booth was on Wednesday and Thursday, 24/25 September at the Eulachhallen in Winterthur.
During these two days, Daniel Stoni, Manuel Schmid, Silvan Gebhardt and myself presented Ubuntu and it's variants to the public.
We mainly gave away the Swiss Remix DVD which really is a great promotional tool! We received a pack from the ch-open guys and almost all are gone. Luckily they also include KDE and Xfce so we could answer nearly all the demands as we only had very little Kubuntu 8.04 left and none of the official Ubuntu 8.04. Only very few people asked for CD's (as they didn't have a DVD slot). Great thanks to ch-open and Matthias Stürmer in particular who had this brilliant idea!
We also had some Kubuntu KDE 4 remix CDs which we had to hand out carefully as it includes a KDE 4.0 aimed at developers and people had to upgrade ASAP to 4.1.2, currently aimed at advanced users. We have to be very careful with the upcoming Kubuntu 8.10 as it will include 4.1.2 and it definitely is not a "beginners" version. This will be done with 9.04 which will include KDE 4.2 considered as final.
There were a few demands for the Server Edition and we pointed them to the download page as we didn't prepare any ISOs for that.
- To Do for next time.
Idem for Edubuntu, as we had a some people willing to spread it in schools. Surprisingly we had a few people asking for the "Children's Edition", one even expected it to include Internet filters for small children... we reminded him that filtering is something the parents should do and every browser includes such tools. I did a small presentation of Gcompris to one of the persons too.
There also were demands for support, either professional or for individuals. Problems which could not be saved at the booth ("what do I do if the printer stops working?") were oriented to the contacts list in our wiki and I sent one professional request to Puzzle Inc. who also had a booth and who are listed in the Ubuntu marketplace. Sorry if I missed another booth of Ubuntu partners.
- To Do: our website should be worked on ASAP to include links to support partners and present Ubuntu in Switzerland more obviously than the wiki page.
- Daniel, are you still interested in working on that?
- Patrick: how fare are you with the website?
Another request was for training classes. I showed the LPI courses available in his region (Migros school, etc.), pointed this person to the LPI booth and explained the Ubuntu certification. He was more interested in beginners classes and this should be considered too in our website.
- Wiki contacts in the Lucerne region, you might get some support requests!
- those interested in offering training: there is a new program by Canonical which a friend of mine is coordinating. Talk to me if you need to get in touch!
We also met Philipp Gassmann, who wrote an introduction to Ubuntu (in German) for his Matura work. He will put it on his wiki as soon as it's finished. He won a well deserved Swiss Open Source Award in the Youth category. Congratulations, Philipp!
- To Do: link to Philipp's excellent work ASAP!
Some thoughts about the Open-Expo in general:
- Catering was awesome!
- The tables could be larger, especially if we consider selling T-Shirts for next time: I picture an Ibex and our logo, doesn't this sound nice?.
Now where does this idea come from? Well, Debian.ch registered a booth and didn't have the necessary people to man it, so we agreed to sell their T-Shirts. One more way to give back to Debian
- Parking should be available for free and that's where Winterthur is not necessarily an ideal place for such an expo, as the parking available was totally taken by the Topsoft booth people unless one arrived 2 hours earlier. Thanks again to Debian.ch for sponsoring our parking ticket on Thursday!
Hope I didn't forget important things, please, booth mates, complete what's missing so we can publish that on the wiki and the TeamReports page.
PS Big thanks also to Silvan who offered bed and breakfast for Mark and me and another thanks to Carlos who organised a dwelling for the Free Software booth people in Winterthur!