[H-GEN] Talk at today's Humbug meeting

[Russell Stuart]

A summary of the talk for those that were not there.

On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 13:02 +1000, Russell Stuart wrote:
> As Marco has said the O'Week stuff is completed now,
> with mixed levels of success.  I will give a brief
> talk on what we did, how it went, and how we might be
> able to do better next year.

Thanks to Marco, Matthew Sellers and Matthew Franklin posters were put
up at the three campuses.  QUT was plastered with them.  There were
fewer public notice boards at UQ and Griffith, but there were Humbug
posters on all notice boards we could find.  I am thinking of doing
another poster run after the initial O'Week rush.

The CD hand out was less successful.  The promised hand out by UQ
Connect during O'Week didn't happen at all due to internal problems at
UQ Connect.  As a backup plan the ITEE student club (which seems to be
run by ITEE itself) offered to hand out our CD's.  We gave them around
1000 to give out, on the condition they gave us back the unused ones.
Based on the number they gave back, I suspect less than 50 were handed
out.

Finally, in an effort at appeasement for their earlier failure, UQ
Connect offered to hand the CD's at a sausage sizzle they were holding
for students.  This was more successful with several hundred being
handed out.  However, I suspect that was only because Marco decided to
take matters into his own hands, by going along to the sausage sizzle to
personally hand out the CD's himself.  I hear he would have handed out
more, but got drafted into cooking sausages.  A huge pat on the back to
Marco for doing this.

So all in all this years effort at promoting Humbug O'Week wasn't a
wonderful success.  But it was a learning experience, which is almost as
good.

Lesson 1 is don't expect others to do your work for you.  If you want
CD's handed out, offer to go along and hand them out yourself - and be
prepared to help out with the cooking as well.

Lesson 2 is about OCA.  I suspect OCA handed out stuff all CD's because
they are even less organised than we are.  However, I gather OCA would
really appreciate any help we can give them.  If we contacted them
earlier - before the academic year ended in 2008, they may well of had a
better O'Week stand, and we would have put out name in front of far more
students.  Assuming I remember, I will be in contact with them at the
end of this year to get things in place for O'Week 2010.

> Secondly, I have heard back from QUT regards bidding
> for LCA 2011, so I say something about that.

QUT's response was: We are keen to host 2011 if you are.   So we will be
bidding for LCA 2011.  In a few months we will have to get going again.
Here is a bit of a todo list for when the time arrives:

- Organise who wants to be on the team, nominations,
- Contact Brisbane Marketing to get them involved again,
- Freshen up the quotes for the various venues,
- Change all the dates in the bid document from 2010 to 2011,
- Update the budget based on Hobart's figures,
- Update our "letters of support" from open source businesses.

And finally, since I am totally out of ideas on how we can tart up our
bid, I thought we might try to put together a promotional video this
year.