Hey! We seem to be quite good at turning up to technical events such as LUG meetings, technical conferences and other self-organised events and telling everyone how great Ubuntu is. However we seem to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted, speaking to people who already run Ubuntu or some other distro, rather than 'converting' people who have little or no exposure to Ubuntu.
Amber Graner recently wrote about her experience evangelising and advocating at a local Goat Festival. She was also interviewed about this on the Full Circle Magazine podcast recently. http://akgraner.com/?p=471 http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2010/07/15/full-circle-podcast-10-trawling-the-internet-for-a-goat-festival/ When I heard about this it made me think that it's something we should think about. Not specifically Goat festivals, but non-technical events. I wanted to canvass the group to see what events people might want to have a presence at. I'm not (at this point) asking for volunteers, but just ideas of events where people go and we might be able to have a stand where we could talk to people about Ubuntu and how they might want to use it. These could be non-technical business events, they might relate to a specific sector such as education, or they could be cultural events like festivals. Anything goes really. I'll start the ball rolling with a fairly generic example that pretty much anyone here can do:- Village FĂȘtes - these attract families from all walks of life, and would be a great opportunity to have a public stand at little or no cost to run. Other attractions could include simple games (always popular at FĂȘtes) with prizes perhaps donated by community members, sponsors or (if willing/possible) Canonical. With summer coming it would be a great opportunity to get geeks _outside_ in the sunshine and show off what we have to offer. What events local to you would you like to see a stand at? I also posted this on my blog where there may be other suggestions. http://popey.com/blog/2010/07/19/ubuntu-at-non-technical-events/ Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/