[Linux-aus] Unofficial Sydney Education Expo 2010 report

[elliott-brennan]

The unofficial Sydney Education Expo 2010 Report.

Though Sridhar mentioned the Expo was not as busy as previous Expos WE
were busy and obviously so to other stall holders who commented on
this to me.

We had seven volunteers attend (including myself and Sridhar).

We had (on day one) a desktop running Linux Mint 9, a laptop running
Mint 9 and five OLPCs.

Day two - Two desktops running Mint 9, a laptop and a netbook running
Fedora and Debian (I think :)) respectively, as well as the OLPCs.

We gave away approximately 250-300 flyers and a similar number of Open
Education CDs and were quite obviously the busiest stand there by a
fair margin.

We had volunteers wandering the halls giving out flyers and CDs. We
had demonstrations of installing - not to completion - and of running
live CD distros.

We also gave out approximately 50 CDs of primarily Linux Mint and
Ubuntu (a few volunteers burnt copies and brought them). People
started asking how they could get the OS so we had more burnt for the
second day.

During the day we ran videos showing how to make 3D text using
Blender, ran "Big Buck Bunny" and Celestia - all as a means to be
eye-catching and (primarily) as examples of what can be done with
FOSS. This was very successful as people came over specifically to see
what it was :)

I also showed a flyer made by my nine year old daughter for a school
project (for which she got an A+) which she created using Scribus
(this was a big hit too, especially when people could compare them to
flyers other agencies/presenters/companies were handing around. Still
amazes me how much people will pay for poor quality).

We were so busy that my idea of keeping a record of visitors went out
the window because we needed more 'hands on deck' to manage the
numbers of people. We usually had about four volunteers at all times.

We were so busy that may of us simply didn't realise that lunch had
passed by. We were busy up until closing time of day one and at the
end of day two had a people coming to us on the death knell - security
and the removalists were hurrying us up!

Many of the people coming were mums and dads. Lots of dad were
interested :)) We also a people (for example, one completing a Ph.D.
in physics and the other with a Ph.D. in mathematics) who were telling
us how they wanted to use more FOSS and specifically move to Linux.

Many people were very receptive to the philosophy behind FOSS. Give we
had so many machines running *nix we were able to give people a fair
bit of hands-on time.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered their time. Everyone has told me
they enjoyed the two days enormously (I know I did):

SLUG
Mel Thomas
Robert Smit
Brett Coady
John Jeremy

OLPC
Sridhar Dhanapalan

Regards,

Patrick Elliott-Brennan



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