[Ambassadors] UTOSC 2008 Report

[John Taber]

David Nalley wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Clint Savage <herlo1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Well, I know FUDCon Brno is going on right now, I hope everyone is
>> having fun over there. But I thought I'd better get this going before
>> I head out on the road again for a bunch of weeks.
>>
>> I've been a bit busy cleaning up after UTOSC 2008, but now that I'm
>> back in the swing of things, there were several blog posts.  A couple
>> were by me and a few by others to help give an overview of the
>> conference and its goings on.  Here's a quick list:
>>
>> A couple from me:
>> http://fedoratutorials.com/2008/08/29/utosc-2008-day-1/
>> http://fedoratutorials.com/2008/08/30/utosc-2008-day-2/
>>
>> A couple from Paul:
>> http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1147
>> http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1143
>>
>> >From others, possibly related to Fedora:
>> http://www.fozzilinymoo.org/Fozzolog/2008/08/utosc-day-1.html
>> http://testopia.blogspot.com/2008/09/utosc-2008.html
>> http://pyrous.net/blog/?p=14
>> http://blog.endpoint.com/2008/08/camps-presentation-at-utosc-2008.html
>>
>> We also have tons of pictures up on our flickr page:
>>
>> http://flickr.com/groups/utosc/pool/
>>
>> --
>> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>>
>>     
>
> Wow- sounds like a great event.
> A few questions for you:
>
> How many people were at the conference?
> How much media was handed out?
> How many contributors did you garner (I know of at least one)?
> Any questions I should have asked but didn't?
>   

There was a lot of good, hard work (especially on Clint's part) that 
went into UTOS and overall I would have to say it was a success.  But 
there was a huge blown opportunity - there were no Fedora (or even any 
Linux) boxes set up to work with the LCD projectors.  Instead every 
presenter had to scramble to get their laptops working to present.  In 
many cases it meant delayed presentations, a poor impression of linux, 
or the use of Mac or Windows.   In the room my talk was in, I watched a 
prior presenter struggle to get his linux presentation working and 
finally settling for 640x480.   To get a decent resolution, I had to 
borrow a Macbook Pro, running OSX (and even then I couldn't show or use 
the bottom status bar during demos).  And on keynote night, there was a 
bunch of sighs and comments around where I was sitting during the time 
Paul struggled and was delayed getting his keynote presentation running 
with Fedora.   In short - not a very good linux or Fedora impression for 
first timers to linux.   Partly this is a reflection on goofy Utah where 
family activities like kid's face painting need to take precedence over 
technical AV prowness just to attract attendees.   Contrast this to 
OSCON where I was told that every presentation setup had Ubuntu running 
so the audience kept seeing Ubuntu  running on the big screen in from of 
them. 

So to anyone else running a FOSS/Fedora conference, try to have linux 
boxes (in this case Fedora) set up for all presenters.  Or have some 
linux friendly LCD projectors that speakers, who need to use their own 
laptops, can use and set up ahead of time in the speaker room.   It's 
great free PR to show Fedora/Linux running on all the presentations and 
it reinforces to the audience that Linux is ready for the desktop and 
can be counted on.   It's one thing to hand out media, it's even more 
effective to show it being used.