[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi all,

On 14/01/2009, at 10:32 AM, Russell Stuart wrote:
> Which illustrates the problem really.  Where do you promote
> yourself?  I am having trouble thinking up places to look.
> It seems odd.  We effectively offer the time of computer
> experts free, and hand out software for free, yet I can't
> think of a place that we can promote this.

Before advertising the shop, make the shop itself appealing.
If I didn't know anyone at HUMBUG, walking into the room would scare  
me in a number of ways.
And that is apart from the old story that Saturday arvos are a dismal  
time for many people with a life.

Computer hobbyism is, in part, a bit of an old thing. Long ago (early  
80s) few people had a computer, and you needed to code stuff yourself.  
Half a decade later a few people had a modem. Half a decade later a  
few people had Internet at home.
These days everybody has a computer, and Internet. Most just use it,  
and don't care that much about what's going on inside.
SOME will have some hassles with how things work and need a bit of  
help, and a FEW will want to dig more and see what makes it tick.

HUMBUG is about the latter two, I would think. But do remember where  
THEY come from (as opposed to where WE [the old hands] come from), as  
it's different worlds entirely.


> As far as I can remember we have always been Windows
> hostile.  Seems reasonable to me, as we are essentially an
> open source club.

It does not seem reasonable to me at all.
  a) there are a lots of OSS apps and tools for the Windows platform.  
Think Firefox and OpenOffice, to keep it very very simple.
  b) anyone even remotely interested in running an OSS OS will 99.99%  
certainly be running Windows now. Being self-rightious geek  
smartypants who feel that OS choice is a religion that anyone in the  
real world actually cares about, may not be the most inspirational  
approach  or yielding the best results.

  c) if they are running Windows now, getting them to try some OSS  
stuff on Windows first is actually a very good approach, rather than  
trying to get them to do a wholesale switch, or showing off a liveCD  
with a magic desktop that (to them) actually looks pretty much like  
the desktop they already have so they wonder "why would I bother"....  
you see?


Having a box of Ubuntu CDs handy (ordered from shipit,ubuntu.com)  
might be good. Apart from being very kind to simple users (with liveCD  
and installer combined), if you stick the CD into a Windows box it  
also contains some of the most common OSS stuff for Windows; so it's  
all-in-one. Naturally, some among you will insist that Ubuntu sucks  
and brand Y is clearly better and must be used, however I would  
suggest to you that if a person is somehow enticed to use Ubuntu,  
that's a win for Linux. So don't be too picky.


Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com.au)
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