Hi all, We had our SFD event last Saturday (9/9) so hopefully this report of our experiences will help some of you with your event. The setting was a stall at a computer market held in a former Bus Depot building in Kingston, a suburb of Canberra, Australia. We will have some photos up at some stage. Our setup was 2 tables with 4 demonstration PCs plus room for CDs and leaflets. It was backed with a banner with the Software Freedom Day logo (blown up to a series of A3 landscape printouts taped together) and lots of FOSS logos (A3 and A4 sized) on it. We had a team of nine, seven of us had the Orange T-Shirts on. I have put the text of our leaflet at: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/canberra/2006/Leaflet Demonstration PCs were running Xubuntu (on an older PC - Celeron466Mhz/128Mb), Gentoo, Ubuntu and a piping hot off the press Kororaa 0.3 pre-release which the Kororaa devs (who live in Canberra) finished for us at 2am that morning an dropped over (Thanks guys!). The general method was to approach people that seemed to take an interest in the stall, initiate a chat about Software Freedom and their own experiences with FOSS and offer them a CD or two with a copy of our leaflet. In 4.5 hours we distributed: - 250 leaflets - 100 copies of TheOpenCD 3.1 (ran out - could have distributed ~30 more) - 170 Ubuntu i386 - 8 Ubuntu 64bit - 9 Ubuntu PPC - 44 Gentoo 2006.1 i386 - 24 Gentoo 2006.1 64bit - 22 Novell SUSE Demo DVDs Some thoughts about the event. Firstly, Positives: - A lot of people stopped to take an interest. It wasn't like we were some shunned store. - The awareness level of Linux was good. (or course a computer market does bring a ready-filtered audience of people with at least a passing interest in computers). - A lot of people were interested in trying a LiveCD just to see what it was like. - A lot of people had tried Linux, and even if they had given up at the time, were willing to try again. Not sure about the other team members but my approach was to assure such people that the user experience (particularly hardware support) has improved markedly in recent times. - Running the Elephants Dream movie as a demonstration seemed to work quite well as an attention grabber. We didn't run it but Celestia has an excellent demo as well. - We felt we did a good job of presenting concept of software freedom. - The OpenCD was very popular. As were the leaflets. - Many people were looking for alternatives to avoid SpyWare/Viruses. - Having someone at the markets entrance to point out our stand and hand out the leaflet worked really well. - The T-Shirts did set us apart from the other stalls and conveyed a message that we were something a bit different. Negatives: - We offered doing installs but there were no takers - not many people had complete systems on them. This was probably a promotional issue. We didn't start organising our event until quite late and the move to a week earlier made things tougher. Also, knowing that the markets would bring in a ready-made audience made it possible to be lazy about it. A standalone event would be a very different matter. - (relevant to Australia) Awareness of Copyright Amendment (TPM) bill and its implications was quite low. Given it probably just came out this is to be expected. - Some people still might have seen us as a store. A front sign saying "Free Stuff" might have helped but could also have meant people just blowing by and helping themselves without a chance for us to communicate our message. - Our demonstrations could have been a little better. Kororaa was excellent, as was Elephants Dream, but possibly having 'live' demos of everyday usage (email/web/office) would have been good too. We lacked an Internet connection which made that hard to achieve unless more organised. Showing IRC support channels in action would also be good imo. Interesting: - Demographics - a lot of people there were aged over 40. Though again, nearly everyone had come to a computer market, not to a SFD event specifically. - A lot of people expressed an interest in putting an old machine to better use (eg. as a backup server) or an old laptop. __ All in all an excellent day that we all feel very satisfied with. All the best for your own event!!! Cheers, Dave. -- David Symons Canberra, Australia http://www.liberatedcomputing.net