[Ubuntu-ch] Report draft - OpenExpo

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

Find below my report for the OpenExpo in Winterthur. Please, Daniel,
Manuel and Silvan, complete what's missing! We will then put it on the
wiki

The booth was on Wednesday and Thursday, 24/25 September at the
Eulachhallen in WInterthur [1].

During these two days, Daniel Stoni, Manuel Schmid, Silvan Gebhardt
and myself presented Ubuntu and it's variants to the public.

We mainly gave away the Swiss Remix DVD which really is a great
promotional tool! We received a pack from the ch-open guys and almost
all are gone. Luckily they also include KDE and Xfce so we could
answer nearly all the demands as we only had very little Kubuntu 8.04
left and none of the official Ubuntu 8.04. Only very few people asked
for CD's (as they didn't have a DVD slot).
Great thanks to ch-open[2] and Matthias Stürmer in particular who had
this brilliant idea!

We also had some Kubuntu KDE 4 remix CDs which we had to hand out
carefully as it includes a KDE 4.0 aimed at developers and people had
to upgrade ASAP to 4.1.2, currently aimed at advanced users. We have
to be very careful with the upcoming Kubuntu 8.10 as it will include
4.1.2 and it definitely is not a "beginners" version. This will be
done with 9.04 which will include KDE 4.2 considered as final.

There were a few demands for the Server Edition and we pointed them to
the download page as we didn't prepare any ISOs for that. ToDo for
next time.

Idem for Edubuntu, as we had a some people willing to spread it in
schools. Surprisingly we had a few people asking for the "Children's
Edition", one even expected it to include Internet filters for small
children... we reminded him that filtering is something the parents
should do and every browser includes such tools. I did a small
presentation of Gcompris to one of the persons too.

There also were demands for support, either professional or for
individuals. Problems which could not be saved at the booth ("what do
I do if the printer stops working?") were oriented to the contacts
list in our wiki and I sent one professional request to Puzzle Inc.
who also had a booth and who are listed in the Ubuntu marketplace [3].
Sorry if I missed another booth of Ubuntu partners.
ToDo: our website should be worked on ASAP to include links to support
partners and present Ubuntu in Switzerland more obviously than the
wiki page.
 @Daniel, are you still interested in working on that?
 @Patrick: how fare are you with the website?

Another request was for training classes. I showed the LPI courses
available in his region (Migros school, etc.), pointed this person to
the LPI booth and explained the Ubuntu certification. He was more
interested in beginners classes and this should be considered too in
our website.
@Wiki contacts in the Lucerne region, you might get some support requests!
@those interested in offering training: there is a new program by
Canonical which a friend of mine is coordinating. Talk to me if you
need to get in touch!

We also met Philipp Gassmann, who wrote an introduction to Ubuntu (in
German) for his Matura work. He will put it on his wiki as soon as
it's finished. He won a well deserved OSS Award Switzerland in the
Youth category [4]. Congratulations, Philipp!
 ToDo: link to Philipp's excellent work ASAP!

Some thoughts about the OpenExpo in general:

Catering was awesome! The tables could be larger, especially if we
consider selling T-Shirts for next time (I picture an Ibex and the
ubuntu-ch logo, doesn't this sound nice?). Now where does this idea
come from? Well, Debian.ch registered a booth and didn't have the
necessary people to man it, so we agreed to sell their T-Shirts [5].
One more way to give back to Debian ;)
Parking should be available for free and that's where Winterthur is
not necessarily an ideal place for such an expo, as the parking
available was totally taken by the Topsoft booth people unless one
arrived 2 hours earlier. Thanks again to Debian.ch for sponsoring our
parking ticket on Thursday!

Hope I didn't forget important things, please, booth mates, complete
what's missing so we can publish that on the wiki and the
LoCoReportPage.

Greets

Myriam

PS Big thanks also to Silvan who offered bed and breakfast for Mark
and me and another thanks to Carlos who organised a dwelling for the
Free Software booth people in Winterthur!

[1] http://www.openexpo.ch
[2] http://www.ch-open.ch
[3] http://webapps.ubuntu.com/marketplace/europe/
[4] http://www.ossaward.ch/
[5] http://madduck.net/blog/2008.09.26:ubuntu-giving-back/
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