Promoting Ubuntu In Zimbabwe

[raymond.swart]

Should we start brainstorming a few ways of promoting Ubuntu in Zim prior to getting the site up and running? A few well placed ad's plus reference to the forums might be a good start to get guys involved, who knows we might get some one important/very clever who wants to help but just didn't know there was a zim ubuntu yet.

What do you think?

[NIT006.5]

RS, I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't start promoting Ubuntu now, but I think it might have a "better" impact if we hold off on any real advertising (in the media or whatever) until the site is up. For starters I think it would be quite cool if we can actually give the web site address as part of the advertising, which means it will need to be running. We can still do demos and promote by word of mouth and all that though.

Not sure what the other dudes think?

[raymond.swart]

I definitly think we should look into newspaper advertising, will start work on a advertising campaign for a few of the papers, will try and get in touch with some of them and see if there is any chance of some pro-bono adverts for us, won't put anything in until we are happy that the site can give out some useful info.

I think we should also try and offer an update CD or something for those guys who don't have broadband, i.e. give them an address's to send in their CD/DVD RW we fill them out and send them back, obviously this would be quite a task as we'd need some kind of free courier or very generous people(s) to get these things around, (maybe Fedex might help us out) it would definitely show new users that Ubuntu Zimbabwe is serious...

Next would be to try and get a printing institution to help us out with stickers/ flyers/ posters so send out which we could incorporate with the update disc's therefore getting other guys to spread the word so on and so on.

[NIT006.5]

Not a bad idea, provided we can get free advertising space - with Zim newspapers, I have my doubts though. It would also be really great if we could get a commercial printer to help out with promotional material, but there again, with the price of printing/paper in Zim at the moment, I'm not sure if we'll have any luck. But, it's still worth trying - nothing to lose!

Being able to offer an update CD would be cool too, but as you say, tranportation is a big issue. This is one of the reasons why I mentioned getting team members from as many different geographical locations as possible (on the Plan of Action page). Instead of having one "central" point responsible for update CD's or whatever, it would make more sense to have an "outlet" in each main area of the country. I don't expect we'll have too many ubuntu users in the very remote areas, so it would probably work fine.

[raymond.swart]

I have been looking at a few loco sites for good idea's and managed to spot some off the aussie site.

One of them kind of solves one of our idea's problems with regards to update disc's, they get guys to send in self addressed envelopes, which would fix our transporting issues of disc's, another one is they got a local sticker printer to print off some "Powered by Ubuntu" stickers for I presume the users PC's.

What do you okes think?

[NIT006.5]

Sending self addressed envelopes is definitely a good plan! Stickers would be nice.... any ideas? (t-shirts, caps, coffee mugs and beer mugs would be nice too..... )

[NIT006.5]

BEER mugs are ESSENTIAL!!!

[tkmunzwa]

I think one of the ways to promote Ubuntu would be to distribute package CDs/DVDs - a la Apt-on-CD.

I recently(-ish) switched from openSuse (due to certain ideological differences ) but one of the disadvantages (to me) was that Ubuntu did not have a set of CDs/a DVD with the various packages. openSuse, fedora et al are usually distributed with a wide variety of packages. I typically install quite a number of packages (multimedia/Development/Games mostly), after installing Kubuntu from CD, my box felt quite bare.

Lets face it, a number of people in Zim don't have an internet connection, having a package repository at hand - on a set of DVDs can be quite handy. It would be excellent if someone in this comunity committed themselves to be able to make copies to anyone who wants them - as long as they bring their own blank media.

just my $0.02's worth.

[NIT006.5]

Very valid point. It's quite something to commit to though. I don't know if it would be logistically possible to get packages off the local repo mirror physically (on disc) so either way someone would still need to download them. I maintain an "internal" sort of repo for our company, which is re-built to include packages and updates that I have downloaded. That alone, in the few short weeks since Hardy's release, is already 4Gb (just for Hardy, and that's just what I've downloaded). So what I'm saying is the repository is just too huge to look at rolling it out on disc. So we would therefore have to "select" which packages to distribute and that could get complicated, based on people's preferences. For instance, the differences between Gnome and KDE packages alone will be huge. So, it could be tricky.

However, I definitely understand the point about not everyone having Internet. It will need a lot of thought to come up with a decent solution. One of the things I've been looking at is trying to rebuild installation discs to include certain additional packages - those discs would then be used by people without net access, who want additional codecs and a few other extras. I haven't succeeded with that yet though - it's an ongoing project.

[curuxz]

My company has a setup a forum for thezimbabwean.co.uk and there is a computer section, its a new forum but getting people to talk with non-techy users about linux in the boards would be a good idea!