Possible means of spreading awarness of FOSS

**jfenn2199** · March 22nd, 2009

Well I figured I want to get things rolling as quick as I could after joining. This idea I had last night is going to take some extensive planning time (as well as fund raising). But every September in Memphis we have the Cooper Young Neighborhood Association Festival (Cooper Young Fest for short), so I was thinking if others in the Memphis area were interested maybe we could work together to get and get a booth this year. There are usually upwards of 1000 people who attend annually and a lot of them are from the mid-town region, and as you in Memphis know we tend to have an aversion to corporatons in this area, so it would be a prime location to get out the word that with Ubuntu Linux is no longer just for the hard core geeks.

So what I was thinking was, if anyone was interested we could get a booth for the festival, and set up a few different machines running Ubuntu (maybe one with Ubuntu, one with Kubuntu, and one with Xubuntu) and have ISO's burned for those who want to switch on their own PC's. Then also if we can raise the enough funds building a computer and putting Ubuntu on it have a raffle where at the end of the day we do a drawing and the person gets the PC.

I don't know what anyone else thinks but I feel it has a good shot at reaching an audience that is already primed to make the move to Open computing even if they don't quite realize it yet.

**Xoanan** · March 24th, 2009

Yes that's not a bad idea; we have a festival every April and in Sept or October in Gallatin. Having a booth at a community fest might be a good idea. I don't know how many Linux users there are in Sumner Co.

**jfenn2199** · March 25th, 2009

Yeah I'm not sure how many there are down here either. But if you're interested trying to get something going with one of the festivals there I would be down for helping. If there's on thing I know well it's organizing an event to show alternatives to the general public and here we have a great product as an alternative. So if you could get me the names of the festivals and the dates I can get to work on what we'll need to get a booth (including materials and monetary requirements).

**Xoanan** · March 25th, 2009

Sure, I'll ask around. I'll have to check to see how many Ubuntu user we have in Gallatin; then I'll ask a buddy of mine what the procedure is for getting a booth at Squarefest.

**jfenn2199** · March 26th, 2009

That sounds good April 25th is gonna be a bit of a crunch to get ready for but we could try! I'll call the 800 number on the Tennessee Vacation page tomorrow to see what the booth fee is and if you have problems finding Ubuntu people up there I wouldn't mind coming up to help out. I can see if my wife will be willing to install Ubuntu on her netbook, if not I could bring up my desktop for people to try it out. I'll do some investigating to see the average attendance each year, so we can have an estimate on the number of installation disks we need to get. But if you want send me a PM so we can arrange a time to get on the IRC.

Alright talk to you later

Joseph Fennell