Education Expo in Sydney, Australia

[Andy Fitzsimon]

Oh Awesome!

Sounds like you guys had lots of fun. So trade show can really be a
blast if you know how to involve people and help them enjoy your
projects.

Holy crap i just saw the photos.   dude, someone drew a portrait of you ? Bam.

That is totally the most successful and fun looking expo booths. 
lets hope others emulate it just as well at other shows. 

10 points



On 5/19/05, Jeff Waugh <jeff.waugh at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> Last weekend I attended an Education Expo here in Sydney. Linux Australia
> sponsored a booth, and quite a few helpers turned up to talk to the (huge
> and interested) audience about Linux and Open Source. We also handed out
> over 500 Ubuntu CDs! I wrote a quick report up, which you can read here
> (pictures and other blog entries linked at the bottom):
> 
>   http://lists.linux.org.au/archives/linux-aus/2005-May/msg00065.html
> 
> A bunch of things worked really well for us at this expo, so I thought I'd
> write some notes for everyone else:
> 
>  * Read my ravings about the education expo audience in the report. It was
>    *broad*. I would encourage everyone here, particularly those involved in
>    the LoCo teams, to check out similar expos in their region. If you find
>    one that is catered to both sides of the education market, get *really*
>    excited. :-)
> 
>  * Get a couple of the helpers, or everyone, to wear something distinctive.
>    Pia and I wore bright orange jumpsuits, which are different, VISIBLE but
>    still "appropriate" (don't wear a loincloth). :-) Everyone on the show
>    floor knew who we were and what we were on about.
> 
>  * Hand out fun stickers. I'll see if Canonical can include stickers in big
>    CD orders for shows like this. We had penguin stickers from a local Linux
>    shop - you could see them everywhere, and everyone was asking what they
>    meant. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu should co-opt Tux, but I'm sure we can
>    come up with some cool ideas for catchy stickers -> reply with your ideas
>    please!
> 
>  * Run a quiz with cool prizes, but most importantly: educational questions!
>    "What are three cool apps that come with Ubuntu?" is a good one. Things
>    that help people understand what it's all about, even if they aren't 100%
>    interested to begin with. At the Edu Expo, we mainly asked fun questions
>    about Linux in general... "What is the Linux mascot?" and "Name three
>    films that were made with Linux!" are two examples.
> 
>  * Have some domain specific material to seed the audience's imagination. We
>    had a list of ICT skills defined by the curriculum with the Open Source
>    applications you could use to learn them. For example, "Word Processing"
>    matched up with "Open Office Writer", while "Send and read email" matched
>    up with "Evolution".
> 
>  * Make sure you have a shortlist of features and benefits. If you're at a
>    techy tradeshow, you'll want to explain why Ubuntu ROCKS, so having a set
>    of cool Ubuntu features you can talk about (great forums, cool community,
>    TotallyRadLaptopSupport) and success stories (HP shipping Ubuntu, things
>    that have happened in your region) is a huge help. You'll know them from
>    heart pretty quickly, because you'll be repeating them all the time. :-)
>    We had a mostly non-technical audience, and a general Linux focus, so we
>    were talking about things like "no viruses", the number of useful things
>    that come on the CD by default that don't come with Windows, compelling
>    features like Gaim doing all the different IM protocols in the one window
>    (which girls absolutely loved).
> 
> Phew. Rock on. :-)
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> --
> GUADEC 2005: May 29th-31st                           http://2005.guadec.org/
> 
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