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The .ORG Village
by Tom Chance on Thursday 22/Apr/2004, @16:20
Was anyone else a little disappointed with the .ORG village in general? I was roaming around for the FFII, UKCDR and AFFS and I just got the impression that it looked very amateurish and unimportant. In contrast to the shiny corporate exhibition going on on the ground floor, down some stairs that looked like they led to the toilets, you found a very small square space with barely room for two or three laptops, and little custom.

It was nice to put names to faces, and a good opportunity for some of the key activists on the scene to have some long chats, but it didn't really feel very worthwhile. It certainly didn't feel like the Free Software community, who, let's face it, do 90% of the work for the "Linux User & Developer" community (be it hackers or pointy haired bosses), were being given the chance to show off their work, their culture, the whole *point* of Free Software to visitors.

But then I suppose that's just the kind of thing one should expect from a trade show. Maybe next time *all* the .ORG village exhibitors should go to the pub together! ;-)
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Re: The .ORG Village
by Ian Reinhart Geiser on Thursday 22/Apr/2004, @17:24
thats par for the course.
we refer to the LWE .org pavilion as the .org ghetto.

the truth is these conferences are for big companies to do more conferences. we are just there to make it not look like the other 50 trade shows they do every year.

not to be totally ungrateful, they are willing to at least acknowledge our presence, but just remember we are just there for the decoration.
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  • Re: The .ORG Village
    by Aaron J. Seigo on Thursday 22/Apr/2004, @18:34
    that's one of the things i really liked about the (admittedly small) LinuxFest Northwest this past weekend: companies weren't the focus, it was about the people and the projects. i think it makes a ton of sense to have such community-centric events to compliment the business-centric ones.
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    • Re: The .ORG Village
      by Ian Reinhart Geiser on Friday 23/Apr/2004, @05:09
      yeah i miss that here. we had a linux fest in chicago back in the late 90s that was a ton of fun. it was a bunch of linux hackers from uiuc as i remember. not to bash the guys who pay the bills, but its nice to not loose focus of why we all came here.
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    • Re: The .ORG Village
      by Inorog on Sunday 25/Apr/2004, @06:19
      Sure, _would_ be great. Reason it's not happening (nearly often enough): money.
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Re: The .ORG Village
by Chris Howells on Friday 23/Apr/2004, @09:01
It was quite disappointing generally. As per usual, the Debian people had by far the nicest booth. We had a bookshelf we had to stand in front of, which was extremely inconvenient. Firstly there was no where to hide behind when you wanted a break, and secondly it was pretty annoying because it was hard to know _who_ exactly was interested in KDE and wanted your attention, rather than just wandering past. It's far easier if they can come up to an actualy booth and catch your eye rather than stare at your back while you finish doing whatever you were doing on your laptop.

Also the wireless internet was pretty crap, at least it existed though :)

Sharing a booth with GNOME is something that is being contemplated, we should then have a large booth with a decent number of visitors and the Debian people can go on a nasty small booth for once :-)
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  • Re: The .ORG Village
    by Tom Chance on Friday 23/Apr/2004, @09:15
    How did the Debian people get that great big booth?

    I agree that theirs was about the only inviting booth in the area. Standing on the AFFS bookshelf, having three "staff" blocked the public from our wares entirely, so that we had to keep moving around to let people pick up leaflets.
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    • Re: The .ORG Village
      by Chris Howells on Friday 23/Apr/2004, @15:17
      No idea, bribing the .organiser maybe? :)

      I guess it was just envisioned that they would have the largest number of people visiting and therefore they should get the nicest place to go. Which I think is unfair -- the other stands would have had more visitors had they actually been nicer :)

      While I certainly enjoyed the expo for its social aspects (was greating meeting other kde-gb people and having a drink or two or ten with them afterwards), I don't feel that things went generally as well as the last expo.

      Oh well I'm doing a bit of thinking and having a look at ways that it could be improved.
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      • Re: The .ORG Village
        by George Wright on Saturday 24/Apr/2004, @03:57
        Yes, the size of the Debian booth was unfair; perhaps that's why JD spent so much time there? :)

        The expo wasn't too bad - I agree that the booth was pretty rubbish though, and the less said about the wireless internet the better... Still, we had our Irn Bru and IRC - what more could a geek want?

        George
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Re: The .ORG Village
by Tom Chance on Friday 23/Apr/2004, @14:47
Just something of interest I found... this shows what the village looked like:

http://www.linuxexpo.org.uk/images/stories/village.jpg
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