Re: Open Day Promotion (was: Re: DebConf18 meeting minutes @FOSDEM2018)
On 08/02/2018, Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
<snipped>
>
> In previous years this has almost always been left too late[1],
> particularly when it comes to advertising at local universities.
>
> As is the case this time, it is very normal for us to be in/near a
> University, which probably has an active Linux user community, but by
> the time anyone thinks about promoting attendance to them it is the
> summer holidays, and the students are all gone.
>
> We then generally end up with the depressing sight of Open Day speakers
> talking to a vast room containing only a handful of people, many of whom
> are DDs (with their heads down, hacking, rather than really listening).
>
> If we start to drum up interest now, people that are somewhat interested
> in Debian can put the Open Day in their diaries, more enthusiastic locals
> can plan to pop in for the conference for some or all days, and we might
> even get people to talk about it enough to do some of our publicity for
> us.
>
> HTH
>
> BTW If you've already put posters up all over the University, and been
> shouting via the relevant student social media, then great, maybe I
> didn't need to say anything.
>
> However, from previous years experience there is never any need to worry
> about too many people turning up, but rather the opposite.
>
> Cheers, Phil.
>
> [1] This is not supposed to be taken as criticism -- it is clear that
> there is always something that seems to be more urgent throughout the DC
> cycle, so it's almost inevitable that this will be forgotten about. I
> just thought I'd try to give it a nudge now to see if it might help.
> --
> |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
> |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
> |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
>
+1 to the above, in my own experience in south africa 2016 I had
prepared quite an elaborate
talk with slides for people who might be wondering why Debian is
needed/is important with my own-use cases, specifically related to
latency and lack of info. as to what is going on the backend when
things appear to be stuck/in loop when the user is left wondering what
is going on vis-a-vis other operating systems.
I had to switch the entire topic around because almost 99% of the
attendees were DD and if I shared the same, it would as have been
preaching to the choir. Nothing new for them.
P.S. - FWIW - I changed it from 'My debian experience' to sort of
'rise of internet in India' which is a different topic altogether. I
had also some photos of the kind of community work that we have been
doing in India, not just me but whole lot of people from different
backgrounds etc. but it was not to be.
P.P.S. - If anybody does put up posters in/around the university,
maybe they can add the bit about GSOC and Outreachy participation from
Debian as well. That should increase the pool of people who apply as
well as a larger pool of students participating in the OpenDay
proceedings.
It also should translate in good vibes for the job fair which IIRC is
held concurrently with the Open Day as well and have more people going
through the booths encouraging even more free software involvement.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
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