Launch Party and Awareness Festival?

[tom.swartz07]

Hi all.

I go to the University of Scranton, and just like many other small to medium sized Universities, Ubuntu and Linux is in a grand minority.


The Grand McAfee Explosion that happened a few days ago brought our entire student and faculty network down. Hard. I estimate that 80% of our students and 95% of our faculty use Windows XP.

Naturally, I wasnt affected by the problem, but many classes were cancelled and lives were thrown into turmoil because of this.

This got me thinking; What if I got together the small community of friends that I have that use Ubuntu (around 5 of us) and organized a small event with a twofold purpose. A launch party for 10.04 and an information source for those looking to get rid of Cisco Clean Access and McAfee?


Does anyone have any ideas to make this really effective?
We have an extremely well traveled Student Center, and there is great visibility there. The student services department allows student groups to set up tables for various causes there throughout the day. What would be some ideas to rope people in to check out Ubuntu?

So far, I am DEFINITELY going to play up the failures of Clean Access and McAfee, but I want to make sure that all of the students know that Ubuntu is not a free version of Mac and Windows.

I was hoping to pick the collective brain and see if we could come up with some ideas to get the whole philosophy of Ubuntu to students quickly and maybe get a few new users!

[Crunchy the Headcrab]

Yeah my University got hit too, but I think it was contained before it did much damage. I hate Clean Access. I never connect to the networks that make me use one more piece of software I don't need.

[tom.swartz07]

Yeah my University got hit too, but I think it was contained before it did much damage. I hate Clean Access. I never connect to the networks that make me use one more piece of software I don't need.

Yep. Unfortunately, our ResNet didnt catch it early enough and it hit almost everyone on campus using XP.
I specifically switched to Ubuntu solely because of the ability to sidestep Clean Access and all of that junk

[tom.swartz07]

Anyone have any ideas to catch people's attention to our stand?

[keithpeter]

Naturally, I wasnt affected by the problem, but many classes were cancelled and lives were thrown into turmoil because of this.

Why? I've taught maths in a building with no electricity (local power sub-station failed). Fortunately the classrooms have windows.

This may or may not help you, but I've given Ubuntu live CDs out to a couple of students to try when their laptops had problems (near assignment deadlines, strangely). They can get online at home (most have usb modem/routers these days) and can back up their files to an external hard drive and bring it in for virus scanning and cleaning. They can also finish the assignment using OpenOffice :twisted:

Gets them using Ubuntu and familiar with the idea of FOSS.

[scouser73]

Anyone have any ideas to catch people's attention to our stand?

Ask the administration staff at your university if they'd kindly send an email to each student about the event that you plan to hold, also using social networking like Twitter & Facebook to advertise the event. Word of mouth is by far the easiest way to tell people what you are doing.