Now that FUDCon2 is over, and we've pretty much decided to not have a FUDCon3 in SF can we put some serious resources into planning the Fedora Booth for LWCE:SF? We've had a couple booths under our belts now, and I think it's time for us to progress beyond the 'tossed together last minute' feel of the booths that I've seen. Not to take away from any great effort that booth people have put in in the past, just having a booth is an amazing amount of work. But with more and more people willing to help out I think we have the opportunity to do a bit more. Having some systems in the booth is good, having them DO SOMETHING is even better. Since we're not going to have any FUDCon talks, I thought doing some mini presentations in the booth using the systems might be a good way to draw some people over and show them what it really is. Personally, I'd love to do a mini talk on kickstart complete with a system being kickstarted. By the same token somebody (or myself) can do a talk in just regular installs because I feel that the installer is one of the best parts of the distribution, and it is unique. Rather than talking about 'and this is how the new openoffice.org looks on OUR distro! See the widgets!?' we can talk about what really sets the distribution aside. In past LWCEs I've been to, the majority of the crowd are 'why would we use your distro' and not 'how can we contribute to your distro', so I think pitching our mini-presentations toward _users_ and if they proceed to ask about contribution, then we can have side discussions about contribution. Maybe we could score a little round table or something so that people that want to talk contribution and project stuff can sit down and take a load off instead of stacking up in front of the booth and blocking the way for people that want to take a look at the shinys. I also think we should have a good diversity of arches represented, an Intel box, an AMD box (dual cores anybody?), I'll have my Apple laptop but maybe a mac mini would be cool for the table. I'd like to do what some other booths have done, have one system (or maybe all systems w/ a switcher) plugged into a projector and the projector projecting on the back wall of the booth or the corner of the booth or something like that so that people bring their eyes up and look ahead instead of stooping to look at table level monitors or whatnot. It could also free table space for systems instead of having a bunch of (heavy) monitors stacked up. Of course, there is the swag aspect too. I assume we'll have t-shirts galore again (do they HAVE to be white?), CDs or DVDs of the distro (maybe we can ping vendors again for vendor branded ones rather than paying to master them ourselves), but what about some higher class items for the people that have a sit down talk about contributing (maybe even an extras contributor account sign up kiosk)? We won't advertise the items so that we don't get freeloaders just faking a talk to get swag, but for those that have a genuine interest we can give them something to thank them for their time? Anywho, these are my thoughts for now, I'm sure I'll have more soon. I'd like to start a wiki page for the booth planning, anybody have a preference where this page goes? -- Jesse Keating RHCE (http://geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (http://www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (http://geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating