[ubuntu-uk] Leaflets

[TheVeech]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 12:13 +0100, Alan Pope wrote:
> Guys and Dolls,
> 
> During the meeting last night on irc we discussed various marketing ideas. 
> These included the Tux 500 [0] campaign and the firefox New York Times 
> advert [2]. These seem to many of us to be very expensive options for 
> marketing Ubuntu.
> 
> An alternative that Hampshire LUG has used at info points is the leaflet 
> [3]. A simple A4 page folded twice to make a handy bit of info to give 
> away. Indeed during Software Freedom Day last year Greater London LUG gave 
> away a leaflet with each Ubuntu CD to help explain FLOSS concepts and where 
> to go for more help.
> 
> At FOSDEM this year I picked up a whole bunch of *BSD leaflets. They had a 
> whole bunch [4] explaining different concepts of BSD.
> 
> I really liked the leaflets, which I figured could be given out with Ubuntu 
> CDs (where ever you find yourself doing that), or just handed to people who 
> ask lots of akward questions :)
> 
> Then we discover we have a member who runs a printing company who would be 
> willing to get his design team to work on the leaflets for us, and print a 
> load too.
> 
> This seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.
> 
> So my questions are, do we have anyone who can write good copy (or know 
> where to blag it from the wiki) to make a good leaflet or two?
> Should this be done by the marketing team and not us?
> What leaflets (at a high level) would you like to see? "What is Ubuntu?" 
> "What is Linux?" "Can I run my Windows software?" kind of flyers immediately 
> spring to mind.
> 
> Help!
> 
> Cheers,
> Al.
> 
> [0] http://www.tux500.com/
> [1] http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html
> [2] http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?InfoPoints/FlyerMasters
> [3] http://gllug.org.uk/index.php?/archives/25-Review-Software-Freedom-Day.html
> [4] http://misc.allbsd.de/Flyer

Will take a good look at this perhaps tomorrow.  Before then, I was
confronted by a friend of mine on Monday, saying he'd been told by two
of his colleagues that they'd tried Linux and thought it was crap.

Reading between the lines of what was said, they clearly understood
little about Linux because they understood nothing of its social and
economic model, a model which means that Linux is a lot more than just
an OS on a CD (so is Windows, for that matter).  This suggests that they
hadn't done any homework about the system, so any faults were likely on
their part.  I think it's crucial that people understand this as much as
advocacy about the OS alone, tools and limited cost arguments.

About the medium, how about also getting a bunch of us to spend some
quality time collaborating on a series of screencasts, then distributing
them on video sites, via bittorrent and even on CDs to be handed out to
the public?