Self Introduction: Nelson Marques

Hi all, My name is Nelson Marques and I'm natural from Aveiro, Portugal. I'm a graduate Marketing Management student in IPAM (Portuguese Institute for Marketing Administration, http://www.ipam.pt). My experience with Linux started in 1999 with Red Hat 5.0 as a hobby. In 2001 I've organized a Linux Promotion event in Aveiro Congress Center, which accounted over 500 visitors during the weekend. This event was sponsored by SuSE GmbH and Sun Microsystems alongside with local GNU/Linux enablers and hardware companies. My Marketing experience comes mainly to a Market Study about the National Footwear Industry and another Market Study for National Vodka Consumer habits, both of them were made through the Institute I attend. I've also developed some work/strategy for 2 communication campaigns (1 Fashion event and one Social Reponsability campaign). I'm currently developing some work to present to GNOME (http://www.gnome.org), mainly a communcation campaign to position the GNOME Brand as a environmental friendly and social responsible brand. This campaign will be named "Save the Wildlife" and will promote endangered species through the advertising of GNOME Releases (each release will have the name of a endangered species), challenges to the GNOME community, such as artists and the promotion of GPL through donner media to be used in GNOME Themes and distributed under GPL. I'm also working on an article for the GNOME Journal that targets the differences between open source software and proprietary software, specially their Marketing Mix and Product Mix. The same article will also cover some "open source vs free software" philosophy. It counts with interviews from the Evince and Brasero developers, Richard Stallman and I've also contacted Ahead A.G. and Miguel de Icaza for interview, currently waiting for an answer. I don't have expectations about this list, I'm just willing to place in some work to help GNU/Linux and Fedora. One of the points that made me join was the fact that Fedora has very well organized documentation and I actually feel like Fedora has a much more realistic approach on Marketing than other projects. This might be a good environment to contribute and expand my knowledge. I do have my graduation paper to start and this experience could help me decide actually what I want to do. One of the things that make me sad was the fact that all the software used during my degree was proprietary, and there are open source projects that are pretty cool, for example: PSPP. Eventually I'm thinking on working on PSPP as a code contributor, but not in the short time as I have still another project running. If there's something I can help with, I'm available, meanwhile I'm just gonna sit and lurk for 1 or 2 weeks, so I can process the information available and get to know how people work and the best way to fit in. Kindest Regards, Nelson