StraightShootinComputin FOSS Team
Jeff Smith Email: <straightshootincomputin@yahoo.com>
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8/27/08 Update! Received my team package consisting of 3 shirts, several CD's, pins, and balloons. Also some SFD stickers. The shirts look WAY better this year!
- Russell County Kentucky Team Page
We are a small group dedicated to increasing awareness of the free software movement by reaching out to friends relatives (and pretty much anyone who will listen) in order to advance the spread and adoption of Open Source ideals.
This will be our 2nd year doing this. I write a weekly tech article in the local paper and have been attempting to increase awareness of FOSS via that channel, and by making available free Ubuntu Linux CD's to interested readers at the newspaper's main office for the past 16 months.
So far I've personally installed Linux on over fifty machines for myself, friends, family and customers, and provided tech support and facillitated finding help from IRC support channels for all of my converts. I have only had one person decide to go back to proprietary software, so I'm pretty proud of my track record.
Last year at SFD2007:
Started with: 30 Ubuntu, 46 Open Cd's, 16 Firefox Kiosk (BoothCD 0.3.7), and 18 copies of Puppy Linux.
Being that we were giving away mostly burned CD's (except for the Ubuntu ones) I printed up some nice looking cases, ala papercdcase.com
We ended up giving away 12 Ubuntu CD's, 14 Open CD's, 7 BoothCD's, and 8 copies of Puppy Linux.
Also gave out about 20 pamphlets on FOSS and Ubuntu (downloaded from Ubuntu site), about 15 flyers that came with package, and around 5 stickers of Super Gnu & Tux to small kids that happened by (gotta catch em young). No one really seemed interested in the FSF bumper stickers or the DefectiveByDesign stickers.
My wife also made some Open Source cookies, and will be posting the recipe on our blog for people to use and add to. You can find the recipe at http://straightshootincomputin.blogspot.com
After 3 hours, we changed locations, but the secondary location turned out to be really dead and we gave away nothing there as no one stopped.
In both instances we were outside, and the weather was great. But being a very rural area, a lot of people passing by claimed not to even own a PC.
The biggest problem we faced was the common misconception that we must be trying to sell something. A lot of people just thought we were trying to sell products and that the free software was a gimmick to get them hooked on something else.... a common salesman trick.
The other problem we had was just lack of good location. Our first location was ok, but could have been better, and our second location was a complete dud. We plan on taking more time next year in procuring a location in the local department store's vestibule where we can reach many more people.
Also, our radio advertising that we had planned did not pan out as i could not reach my contacts at the two local FM stations in order to tell them we were out there and we were ready.
This was our first year though, and with proper planning and lessons learned, I believe next year can be a lot better.
The only thing I would ask sponsors to do next year that wasn't done this year would be to include some sort of banner in the supplies kit.
Also, if you were to send a data disk with pdf's that could be printed out and folded into cd cases for burned disks, that would be really good. Also stickers to go on the disks would be nice as well.
We made one using some foamboard and markers, but a nice looking LARGE sign would have gone a long way to gather some attention.
On the one hand, it was disappointing that we didn't reach more people, but on the other hand, each person who took CD's from us stayed for a little and I was able to talk to them personally about their computer issues and I feel that they will actually use the disks that they took from us and be benefitted by them.
Next year I hope to post some flyers up at the highschool and maybe even make some disks available there as well.