Hi there! These is a report of the Merchandise BoF at DebConf10: http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/683.en.html http://wiki.debian.org/Merchandise/BoFDebConf10 First of all, thank you to anyone who attended the BoF, it was not only interested, but also fun to discuss about the different ideas people had to promote Debian through merchandise. On Sun, 2010-08-01 at 12:29 -0400, Luca Capello wrote: > BTW2, should this be discussed in a more general mailing list? I have > just realized that there is no general debian-events@ mailing list, so I > do not really know a better place... I cc:ed the debian-publicity@ mailing list because during the meeting we decided that the best place to continue discussing about merchandise should be the Debian Marketing Team <http://wiki.debian.org/Marketing>, which mailing list is... debian-publicity@! Before any flame, please read the *full* mail, thanks in advance. This very same mail will also be included in the BoF wiki page, if you need to add something it would be better to both reply to this mail and update the wiki page if the information belongs to the report as well. Here we go! > I have also created a DebConf10-specific wiki page for stuff to be > discussed during the BoF: > > http://wiki.debian.org/Merchandise/BoFDebConf10 I think the best thing is to simply go through the different points. 1) general situation, who has what Basically, this is already covered in the Wiki merchandise page I create before the BoF <http://wiki.debian.org/Merchandise>. There are mainly 4 different "entities" with merchandise stuff (Alexander Wirt, Debian Brasil, debian.ch and Debian UK), plus Adrian von Bidder (umbrellas) and Anto Recio & Holger Levsen (wine). I vaguely remember someone (Luciano?) pointed out that something was missing, in that case please fill in the wiki page and put a note in the report on the BoF page. It should be stressed out that not all of the merchandise present there is actually available. My idea was to have a general overview of what we had, have and could have. I do not think we need at this point a more specific list, since I am quite sure the common (and well-selling) merchandise (T-Shirts and foilstickers) is usually renewed/reproduced. 2) status of the official Debian merchandise page <http://www.debian.org/misc/merchandise> Given that Debian itself does not sell any merchandise, it was clear that we should not put any "direct" link on this page, i.e. no links to the non-commercial organizations. However, since "the information below is provided as a favor to our loyal users", it was also clear that we should provide a link to a non-commercial merchandise page, where our loyal users can find what is available and how to buy it. This can be the same wiki page of point 1) above or another one, but it would be better not to have it hosted on www.d.o, thus anyone can easily modify it. We discussed shortly about the merchandise@debian.org address, but we were not able to find out who actually receives this mail, thus we stop at this point. IMHO this address should be the primary resource for any merchandise question, being it official/commercial or for booth/event preparation. 3) sort of HowTo for booth people to complement the DebianEventsHowto Thanks to the work done by I guess the Debian Publicity Team, we already have a quite exhaustive wiki page <http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsHowto>. While in this page I have already added a link to the merchandise wiki page, this is not enough. Instead, we should complement that page (or create a new one) with specific information on how to request/manage/return the merchandise. Following the BoF, I had a discussion with Carl Chenet (together with Xavier Oswald organizer of the Debian booth at the recent RMLL in Bordeaux <http://2010.rmll.info/>) and Zack: we ended up with a possible workflow. Please bear in mind that nothing has been decided yet, on the contrary everything must be discussed with the different teams involved (Marketing, Publicity and Events, if it ever exists one). People organizing booth should deal with a single specific entity and they should be able to simply request for a booth box. Obviously Debian will cover any shipping costs, for both receiving and sending back what was not sold. This booth box should contain a pre-defined set of merchandise stuff: T-Shirts, flyers (e.g. <http://debian-flyers.alioth.debian.org/>) and so on. For a better (and in some case also professional) booth experience, Debian could also provide booth infrastructure, i.e. foldable containers for flyers or foldable poster standers [sorry for the names, I do not have any idea how these are called in English, I hope you can get them!]. Given the fact that most of the conferences take place either in the Americas or in Europe, there should be two different boxes and thus at least two different people in charge. This will also assure a sort of redundancy to requests. 4) new merchandise I condensed the funnier points (because we should have decided something for ourselves!), since practically nothing was decided. The Swiss Army knife will be for sure produced. The major concern people had was the "flying portability" of the knife, which is why someone proposed to not have a blade at all. maddog also told us that Victorinox can produce a "foldable" version, thus choice is now even more difficult. I will continue the discussion after the general merchandise problem has found a solution. For the new T-Shirt design, if people have ideas the best thing would be to simply send an email to me (or to the "merchandise" mailing list, once this will be set up and people agree it is the right thing to do) and I can act as a proxy. 5) various I did not know that there was already a Publicity BoF scheduled for DebConf10, my fault, sorry: http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/607.en.html While merchandise is clearly publicity, I think that it was anyway worth to have a separated merchandise BoF. Anyway, given how much we talked, it is clear that we would have hijacked Jeremiah's time, not a very good thing for him and the whole Publicity Team. I will try to attend that BoF as well, but I am not sure I can due to my new videoteam membership. Thx, bye, Gismo / Luca
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