[UbuntuWomen] publicizing a conference

[Catherine Devlin]

Hello, ladies!

Well, I've volunteered to be "publicity coordinator" for PyCon 2007.  The
fact that I know absolutely nothing about publicity wasn't about to stop
me!  I thought I might ask for advice or resources here... have any of you
worked on publicizing open-source events before?  Your experiences would
probably be very relevant to PyCon - the parameters of the problem are the
same (low budget, but lots of enthusiasm and creativity).

So far, the plan is to create press releases for a variety of print journals
and websites that serve the community of interest... but I've never written
a press release before, and I've certainly never gotten one into the
hands/inbox of the right people.  We're not necessarily planning any more
elaborate publicity - in previous years it's been just word-of-mouth, blogs,
and mailing lists - but I'd be happy to change that if we get any really
good ideas.

It would be especially nice to draw in a good crop of students from campuses
local to the conference area.  We offer cheap student rates, but it's been
hard to get students in the past - you know, they're all too busy working on
their assigned class projects (usually on Microsoft-"donated" software,
bleah.)  Ideas for catching their attention would be especially nice.

Thanks so much for your suggestions and thoughts!

(Oh, and I'm not neglecting Ubuntu itself while I'm at this.  My current
ambition is to start pushing updated packages to the Universe where it's
fallen behind.  For instance, I think that the Mercurial project is on
version 0.7.1 whereas the Universe is at 0.3.  So I'm studying the Masters
of the Universe section of the Wiki.)

- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/
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