[Kde-events] my personal cebit review

[Mirjam Wäckerlin]

Hi,

I agree with Daniel and Alexander, the event went fine and I was
surprized of the amount of people who donated.
For donations and merchandising, it would be nice to have some
preprinted document for better accounting - we tried to do so
ourselves, but there were several moments where our booth was so
crowded with visitors that is was just not possible to write down all
the donations (this was also due to the limited space). If we had some
form it would at least ease this process.

The apartment was fine, though it would be nice to find something
closer to the fair. It takes about 50 minutes (30 minutes by train and
20 minutes by foot), and especially the walking part can be a real
pain after a whole day of being upright (... and sneakers are not the
choice for cebit but rather heels ;) ).

On 3/21/07, Daniel Molkentin <daniel at molkentin.de> wrote:
> Am Dienstag 20 März 2007 schrieb Alexander Neundorf:
> > 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
>
> Towards the end, we had 3-2 people at the booth. But that was perfectly fine
> given the limiting factor to satisfy customers was the lack of more demo
> points (and therefore the available booth space).

Very true!

> > 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.
>
> I basically bought out our delivery shop on monday, when I express-ordered new
> shirts and pins. They arrived on tuesday morning, so we could sell them.
> However, the T-Shirts are almost entirely sold out again (except for S-Size),
> Pins are still available.

I would love to see some other merchandising stuff, e.g. a little
stuffed konqui (as it has been discussed on this list lately) - Novell
had those really cute chamelons, I'm sure people would adore little
konquis ;)

> > -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).
>
> ACK!

Yes please! Something more general would be useful, especially for
people new to linux/KDE, and, as far as I've seen the business flyer
was only printed in English.

> > -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.
>
> On a positive note, I have the donations with me. I'll count them when I'm
> back home and pass them on to the KDE account. I think it's at least 300
> Euros, playing a good share of the cost of this event.

On monday we had more than 150€ (I handed them out to Franz because we
couldn't stay till wednesday). I suppose the 300 are from tuesday and
wednesday only?

> > 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.
>
> Yes, we need a good solution for this. I'd also like to propose to have metal
> tags like the debian folks for those attending events on a regular basis.
> This looks a lot nicer than a fat nametag.

ACK to both.

> All in all I think this was a very successful event, especially considering
> the fact that there was no single person attending all days who acted as a
> local coordinator. We need to improve communication and planning for this a
> bit, though.

ACK. Though Alexander gave me most of the needed information, we had
some moments of incertitude (like seeing posters from Scribus on what
was supposed to be our booth) but I think we have balanced everything.

I was glad to see how excited people were about KDE and especially
KDE4. Chitlesh had installed it on his Fedora and people were eager to
see each snippet of it. He also did some slides on KDE4, do we have
some place online to stock such material so that they can be reused?

Regards,

Mirjam