On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 06:12:31PM +0200, Michael Meskes wrote:
> But think about it, if everyone's wearing the same T-Shirt it's very easy to
> see who is doing booth duty. This makes it much easier for visitors.
Well, IIRC last time every helping person in the Debian booth wore
either the bottle or the big gnu-and-penguin-shirt. Together with the
badges it was pretty obvious who's running the booth.
> Neither. The problem IMO was the highly technical insider stuff discussed.
> No visitor is interested in working his way through such a discussion just
> to find someone to talk to. These people are not used to open source
> projects but to professional trade shows. Their thinking probably is (my
> experience): "Hey, if they don't want to talk with me, so be it. I leave
> them alone and keep doing what I did before."
And _this_ is the way to go: going out of the booth tracking down
people looking a bit confused, even if they wear a suit :) It really
works, at least for me. Ok, it's more fun to talk shellscripts with a
buddy than telling a newbie that we _really don't_ earn money by doing
debian and what we consider as free software... But I believe that the
strength of Debian is that we want to help people (or why do we do
this :) The Debian booth is the place where you really get help and
advice, where someone has time for you, because our success is not
measured in sells per hour. We can't convince by ISO9001 or big sales
charts, but we can tell everybody personally, why we feel that our
distro is great. And believe me: a Debian-guy you don't at all
understand because he speaks some kind of techie-language but with
glowing eyes and fun is more convincing that a SuSE-guy in a nice suit
who only reads the flyers out loud and hasn't installed the stuff ever
in his life...
> > Furthermore I don't think visitors think of debian people as daemons when
>
> Depends on which people you mean. I've seen quite a lot of people pass by
> like a daemon on other booths too. Just imagine you are getting your first
> look into open source after using proprietary stuff throughout the years.
> Which booth would attract you, SuSe or Debian?
IMO it's not the booth that has to be attractive, it has to be the
staff who goes out and asks "Hello mister, do you know the Debian
distribution?". And of course attractive is the wrong term for Debian
folks ;-) but at least we should show the fun.
Ok, I hope I don't insult someone, because I had far too less sleep,
but to stress you with a (last!) metaphora: its better to listen to an
orchestra playing wrong but with lots of fun that to the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra directed by Karajan: every note played
perfectly but with no soul in it.
Ok, enough strange stuff from me, I'm going to shower to get my brain
into normal mode :)
Thimo
--
Thimo Neubauer <thimo@debian.org>
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