Re: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] Want to present at LINUXWORLD NY/ 2002?]

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

"zeruch [Joseph Estevao Arruda]" wrote:

> 1. It was so grass-roots and ideological, that a lot of the pragmatic
> reasoning that would have appealed to business folks was not covered.

Well, grass roots is what we do.  I don't remember it being particularly ideological,
but that's a value judgment.  Since we were talking about education, I don't know that
appealing to business folks was a big concern.

> 2. No case study like material (i.e. University level projects involvong
> things that have more broad applications - i.e. collaboration sw like
> Sourceforge, PHPGroupware, etc. and things like
> clustering/bioinformatics.  You know, how do research departments gather
> most bang for limited buck and what functional benefits do they glean
> from either a hybrid or fully OSS environment).

I agree with Harry on this.  University level stuff is well covered already.  We were
focussing on education below university.

> 3. The panelists did not gel well.

I guess it must have looked different from the other side.  I thought we did pretty well
together.

> I would look at getting someone that manages an OSS heavy environment in
> a research lab at a University or even a professor (i.e. someone who
> teaches a compiler course and focuses on GCC or a DB course that uses
> PostgrSQL)

They're easy to get, but again it doesn't go to the educational community we're
particularly trying to reach.

> While the elementary and HS stuff is cool and can be mentioned, *most*
> of it is not applicable to the majority of the demographic attending.

Actually, you'd be surprised.  At NYC we found a fairly great number of people stopping
by the booth who had a strong interest in what we were doing.  Besides, catering to the
demographic you guess is there rapidly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy--the people
interested in other things stop coming.  If we want to see more K12 educational
interest, we have to provide interesting things for them to see and do.

> If it still doesn't work for LWCE NY there is always ALS.

Oh, for the time and money to attend all these shows and put on credible presentations!
But more than a few of us have noticed that any non-commercial projects and
organizations are being increasingly shunted aside at these big shows.  That's partly
because the show organizers only know how to deal with commercial organizations (it's
extremely obvious from their pre-show contacts with us), but I can't help feeling that
it's also partly because many of them think, "OK kids, you've created a demand for Linux
and associated products; now it's time for you to shutup and let the adults take over."
As I said earlier, Pete and I have thought a bit about this and I'll try to post
something on it in a few weeks.

--
Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain