Ubuntu-be.org spreads Ubuntu love at VLOD education conference

[François Cauwe]

Ubuntu-be.org spreads Ubuntu love at VLOD education conference

During the 4 day long Flemish education conference, the Ubuntu-be.org
volunteers spread their edubuntu enthusiasm around the directors and
ict-responsibles of all Belgium schools. The VLOD-conference is the
biggest education conference in Flanders which about 8000 people, mainly
decisionmakers attend. We started on Monday at 10 o'clock with a
workshop about edubuntu in schools, and after that we manned the booth. 

The results were astonishing; people were interested to discover this
system everybody was talking about. We showed them the possibilities and
advantages of 'free software', and gave them a demo of thin clients. And
quickly we had more people listening at our booth than our colleagues
from Vista. 

On the first day after the closing of the conference, all the people
from the Vista booth came over to ours to discover what was happening,
so we spread the ubuntu-love among them as well... 

The week went on and gave us a really good feeling about it, schools
were really interested! People mailed us with questions, came back to
thank us, telling that it was fantastic that everything simply worked.
Some companies came to tell they used ubuntu in their showroom as well,
and they wanted to help us, even with sponsoring... It was just
fantastic! 

On Wednesday we also had South-African visit from Canonical, Richard
Weideman was in Brussels, so he also visited the conference. 

A bit later we also got a visit from the "Education Business Manager" at
Microsoft Belgium, Christian Ramioul. 

In total we distributed more than 700 CD’s and collected more than 300
names and email addresses from interested people. 

We would also thank all the volunteers that helped us make this
possible! Especially: 

      * Annelies Bollen 
      * François Cauwe
      * Xavier Cauwe 
      * Ismaël Demiddel 
      * Guy Duportail & linux-service.be: our sponsor 
      * Jan Fabry 
      * Jens Timmerman 
      * Dieter Verfaillie 
      * Richard Weideman 
      * Mark van den Borre 
      * The inevitable invisible and forgotten volunteers