Give aways

[Matt Burkhardt]

News story - Ubuntu give aways -
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=22245

I wrote to James Burgett and got a reply -
----- From James Burgett

'm running around like crazy right now. So i don't want to waste your
long distance phone time. My E-mail is included at the botom of this
document.

 Look results speak louder than words or opinions.

 You helped 3 people, we had over 100 volunteers and helped over 350,

I've been doing this for 14 years and I've never had as effective or
productive a day as we had at the event.

 Setting up a central mirror  moved install time from multiple to
fractional hours.

 Stockpiling machines before the event  got around the people who  want
us to install linux on a  xt and allowed us to provide a much more
pleasant experience for the volunteers as everyone felt productive.

 People are much more willing to volunteer for things that don't require
that they haul a box across town, schools play well in the media and you
move from geeks with some strange software that no one has never heard
of  (or if thay have they can probably load it themselves)

 So do you want to market geek?  or  social and environmental justice?
In addition you end up with a population that is wiling to listen to
open source positions. (anyone who thinks that the open source movement
is not a political movement is just plain ignorant and tying open source
to justice is easy {diebold}).

 Corporation want to give you stuff. (we got gig-E switches,pizza,lots
of various companies shwag,etc)

 People are more willing to help kids than they are to experiment with
something new. Make them do something new for kids.

 Many of them will like what they see during the install and ask for
ubuntu cds.

----- end of message from James Burgett

I'll be at the meeting tonight, so maybe we can chat about it

-- 
Matt Burkhardt, MSTM
President
Impari Systems, Inc.
Phone:  (301) 644-3911
mlb at imparisystems.com
http://www.imparisystems.com