[Kde-events] my personal cebit review

[Wendy Van Craen]

On 20-mrt-07, at 21:29, Alexander Neundorf wrote:

> Hi,
>
> here comes my personal Cebit review, I was there from thursday to  
> sunday.
> The first two days we were in a tiny booth directly beside the  
> Debian booth.
> On saturday we changed with Franz Schmid (the Scribus guy) to a  
> bigger booth
> directly beside the Gnome booth. This worked out really well, we  
> didn't have
> problems with them, quite the opposite, we had quite some fun and  
> helped each
> other where we could. We even gave them some Fedora DVDs so they  
> had at least
> anything to give away :-)
>
>
> What was good:
> --------------
> -we had lots of CDs/DVDs to give away, mostly kubuntu and SUSE
> -our booth was very well staffed, every day at least 4 people
> -with Melissa, Tobias and Steven we had three first-time  
> contributors who did
> a good job :-)
> -every day at least two people from our booth staff were wearing  
> some kind of
> suit or at least a jacket (e.g. as opposed to the Gnome or Debian  
> booths,
> only T-shirts there). For Cebit this is a good thing.
> -we had quite many T-shirts to give away against donations
> -we had some K-pins and a few K-bags to give away as donations
> -the boothbox which contained:
>   -two 19" TFTs, 2 mice and 1 keyboard where there
>   -tape, pens, some plastic name tag/business card holders (?)
> -we had a nice central flat
> -we had these nice KDE display systems, they are really looking good
> -we took quite some photos, I'll put them online somewhere
>
> Best of all: the great people manning the KDE booth ! :-)
>
>
> What can be improved:
> ---------------------
>
> -T-shirts, pins and bags were sold out on saturday afternoon, so  
> having more
> of them would have been even better. But actually this were around  
> 30 T
> shirts, I think that's actually already quite much. But more K-pins  
> would
> definitely have been good.
>
> -having 3 or 4 clothes-hangers in the boothbox would be good, for  
> putting the
> T-shirts on them
nice idea!
On Fosdem I saw a booth with a rope hanging up behing it, to put  
shirts and other merch on it.
>
> -we received KDE business oriented flyers on friday, this was  
> better than none
> at all. They should now last for some time. We need more types of  
> flyers
> (home users, developers, other contributors).
I agree with you on that.  The flyers for home users could show some  
screenshots with small information-balloons of how great KDE 4 is.
>
> -the Gnomes have a "what do like about Gnome / what don't you like  
> about
> Gnome" wall, where visitors can write on colored sticky notes what  
> they
> like/don't like. That's a good idea. Here's a foto:
> http://www.neundorf.net/pics/gnome-ideas.jpg
Gnome also did this on Fosdem.  What I like about it, is that they  
really have a fix organisation structure in event-organising, which  
then again has a possitive influence on the project (makes it all  
look more seriously and more professionally, than having a mish mash  
of different booth-styles and presentation-styles).

However I'm rather critic about their idea of sticky notes at the  
don't like site.  I wouldn't make a large visible bord on which  
people could stick their "complaints".  Rather I would let visitors  
fill in a small questionaire (on website or at booth on paper or  
computer).
Making minor points of a project visible could harm the image.   
Remember that on an event you would like to make a good impression  
and attrackt new users, developpers and business-people.
Yes, I know it's also important to know what users dislike or would  
do different.  Well, why not just ask them by doing a little social  
chat or maybe in that little questionair?
This gives a much better impression and people get the feeling that  
we care for them and really listen to their ideas, which again should  
improve our image.

Making a wall with only "what I like about KDE" however is a good  
idea, but you should also remember to invite people to your booth,  
because direct-contact still works the best.
>
> -we had a A3 "poster" inviting people to donate. I'll put this into  
> svn RSN.
> Having one in A2, maybe laminated would be even better.
>
> -we didn't have any "real" KDE poster to put on the walls, so we  
> used the
> T-shirts as decoration. This worked too.
>
> -we have an example user in svn with some data, but it could use  
> some more
> work
>
> What was not so good:
> ---------------------
>
> -we didn't have generic KDE business cards/nametags. Having a  
> bigger amount of
> nameless cards in the boothbox so that the booth people who don't  
> have their
> own KDE business cards can write their name on them would be really  
> good and
> shouldn't be too expensive either. So we had to "pimp" some of my  
> cards with
> white tape to cover my name and write the respective names over it.
>
> So, now we only need a nice dot article about KDE at Cebit and we  
> will have
> had a really good event :-)
>
> Bye
> Alex
greetings
Wendy
>
> P.S. is this the correct mailing list or should I post it to kde- 
> promo ?
> -- 
> Work: alexander.neundorf AT jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
> Home: neundorf AT kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
>       alex AT neundorf.net               - http://www.neundorf.net
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