Hi Melissa, (See below) On 7/25/07, Janet Hawtin <lucychili@gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/25/07, Melissa Draper <melissa@meldraweb.com> wrote:
Greetings,
I'm currently writing an article to promote this year's sfd. However, I'd like to be able to include positive impacts that previous events have brought about.
Nice one Melissa. ok Paul's team at Mawson lakes brought linux folks and air-stream folks together. This month there were presentations by linuxsa person at air-stream and an air-stream person at linuxsa. People are able to see the connections between the kind of participation you can have in a community network and the kind of participation in free software.
Paul might have other suggestions. Dale and crew at the Southern Vales event might have stories too.
The SFD event at Mawson Lakes on 2006 was setup and called "Software Freedom Showcase", and was setup to allow various groups to in the community that were doing FLOSS related stuff to have a group meeting and be available to explain to others who might wander in what they did and how they did it. The Mawson Centre is a centre shared between the University of South Australia, the local primary school and the local council. (As a possible suggestion on how to get an idea on what else might be possible, replace 'Mawson Centre' with the name of your local community centre, library, or primary school.) The Mawson Centre contains the local public library, which was useful for getting foot traffic, but the event wasn't relying on this. 'Bill, the Penguin' and a book display of FLOSS related books, were set up during the week prior to the event. This generated quite a bit of interest, particularly Bill, who is a 1.2m inflatable Emperor Penguin, but we weren't relying on this. Rather, the invited groups were able to mingle with each other and find out what they were each doing and generally socialise and 'grok' with fellow FLOSSers. Main groups involved: - Bettong.Org - Free and Open Source Community Projects and Training - Air-Stream - Community Wireless Network also.. - Demonstration of Music and Audio software for Linux - Demonstrations of Linux games - A home build segway As well as this we also included the following groups which provided entertainment over lunch: - Chicago Show Band - Local community band - Swing Dancers - A group that also meets in the Mawson Centre. Outcomes.. where do I start. Air-Stream made some very useful connections with the University of South Australia, to the point that Air-Stream now has the full support of the Mawson Centre board and it's accessability in the venue. This goodwill may be extended to the other campuses in the University. Bettong.Org was able to demonstrate their Ubuntu desktop and training capabilities, which led into a very successfully BarCamp event in March 2007. Due to the SFD event, an invite was also received to an 'I.T. Discovery Day', run by the Mawson Centre early in 2007, to commemorate the launch of 'Delfins Community Website'. Participants of SFD were invited back on the day which was run like a mini-SFD event. There exists an open invitation to be involved in any future such events. Members of Bettong.Org and Air-Stream have continued to work together on a range of other projects including: Mesh Networking (olsrd), Network portal infrustructure, improving the community wireless network. In addition, presentations have been given to LinuxSA by people as a direct result of their participation in SFD. Also, two new Linux User Groups, possible three, have started in Adelaide during the last year. These groups have been supported through contacts made as part of SFD, and one of these has also registered as a SFD team this year as well. (Is this the sort of thing that your after?) Cheers, Paul