FOSS.IN 2009 Day Five - A great day for opensolaris
Folks:
We've got a number of people interested in opensolaris technologies :)
We held a contest today - solve ZFS and DTrace based problems, and get
a T Shirt. We gave away all the T Shirts that we had ! :) We had
people from across India participating in these contests, solving
small ZFS assignments, and asking us questions on how ZFS works.
DTracing PHP is one of the more interesting things that for people interested.
Here are some lessons learned:
- Giveaways/Freebies are good - people come for them, and you can get
them interested in lots of things.
- Prepare demos well in advance.
- Simple demos are enough if they illustrate the point.
- Puzzles and Assignments are great to pique a guest's mind. The
participant knows that the puzzle would be solvable, since others have
solved them as well.
- Have more CDs and T-Shirts on hand.
- Start the contests earlier.
- Prepare contents on more topics than just ZFS and DTrace.
- Having a LiveCD helps a lot.
- Have an action item for people to do after they leave they stall or
end the demo.
This could include signing up on the discussion group, providing them
with information on how to start and run a group in their own regions,
etc.
Interesting things that happened:
- Some people came back getting others along for ZFS and DTrace demos.
- Others returned with skeptics, and asked me to demonstrate ZFS again.
I sometimes asked the returning person to showcase what he or she had
just learned :)
- We ran out of T Shirts and CDs !
- There as this participant who spent three hours with the DTrace toolkit.
We're very excited by today's success, and have begun preparation for
the next events to be held in the coming Feb (Mumbai) and March
(Bangalore).
We're also going to get in touch with folks at Sun to ensure that
evangelization goes off well at the upcoming Sun Tech Days in 2010.
-- Sriram
