[Linux-aus] Vista v. Linux Movie

[Paul Wayper]

gareth wrote:
> Hi Chris. Yes I have. It's a good site and very friendly but a lot of
> people don't respond well to text.
I would also point you in the direction of
http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net.  It too has great information and great
reasons why people should make the move to Linux, but I will concede
that its presentation is still primarily text-based explanations.

I see two problems with your 'don't tell them, show them' idea,
however.  Firstly, we need quality presentations.  Secondly, we need
people to do them.

There is some effort to get this kind of stuff out there.  There were a
handful of ads for Firefox shown recently on Canadian TV (see
http://www.digg.com/software/Firefox_TV_Commercial and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Firefox#Firefox_Flicks) - $250,000
was raised by volunteers and given to the Mozilla Foundation to promote
the browser.  There's no reason why we can't do this.  I'm sure getting
a grant together, or a pledge bank system for LA members and other
enthusiasts, would get a nontrivial amount of money together to get a
reasonable set of ads in place.  Likewise, the firefoxflicks.com site
ran a competition to get enthusiasts to submit their own videos
promoting the browser (with a $5000 prize and professional judging,
too).  Hey, if Good Game can get a bunch of amateurs to submit videos
for their their christmas competition, then surely we can.

But this can't be just another unsteady handycam watching Ubuntu boot,
or a bunch of talking heads expounding on deep kernel structures, or a
"this is how to play Solitaire in SuSE" video.  We have to understand
marketing.  We have to make something that really gets the point across,
and has all the qualities of a viral meme that the market really loves. 
It has to be something that people enjoy watching but that gets the
point home.  It has to be something that we're _proud_ to watch.  There
are too many videos on YouTube that try to promote Linux and end up
making me cringe - totally biased, hopelessly amateur, and ignorably
trivial in their scope.  We have to do better than that.

Anthony's summed up what we have to get across very well: we have to aim
for brand recognition.  In my view Linux Australia is the ideal vehicle
for this - it has as its primary purpose the promotion of Linux and
Free/Libre Open Source Software, and it makes sense for it to act as the
coordinator of our efforts to get this working.  So what we need to do
for LA in order to move this along is:

* Ideas, scripts, outlines, manifestos: anything that can go into a
presentation.
* People to massage these into coherent videos or other presentations.
* People with video recording, demonstration and editing equipment
capable of making the videos.
* People with contacts in the TV, radio and print industries that can
get us time and space.
* A place to coordinate all this.  A wiki on the Linux Australia site,
maybe?

I'll follow up with my ideas for TV ads in a separate post to keep this
one manageable :-)

Have fun,

Paul