[HLUG] Software freedom day - how it went

[Meijin]

Great to hear it went well.

Thanks to all involved.

Rob

Julian Robbins wrote:
> Hi
>
> Software Freedom Day went quite well. We weren't swamped by people, but 
> the people who did come to find out what it was about, were genuinely 
> interested and we spent quite a while with each person, giving 
> information, demos and giving out DVD's. Quite a few were regular 
> customer's of Matthew's that he had mentioned about SFD.
>
> We had one chap who had seen our posters who came in and was very keen 
> to get a secure pc to just browse the web, check his emails etc. He 
> wasn't a techie, just a regular PC user. Pete demonstrated his skipware 
> PC with a Windows dual boot with Linux to show how the two can co-exist 
> side by side. The chap was very happy to see an alternative to Windows, 
> and may well end up buying a Linux netbook pc from Cookeys ! Another 
> chap (who was French I believe) wanted to get Linux installed so he 
> could try statistical programming with 'R', and SPSS (??). Another lady 
> who was an existing customer of the shop, wanted to use a database and 
> didn't want to pay £100 odd quid for MS Access. I showed her OpenOffice 
> Base, and Scribus, Gimp etc for her graphic work. A number of people 
> mentioned how bad a name 'the GIMP' is. Perhaps they should change it!
>
> Using the shop was helpful as it was fairly central, and Matthew made us 
> very welcome considering he was also running his business alongside. All 
> in all a successful event.
>
> To be honest, it would have been better to get more through the door but 
> we would not have been able to help each person as we did on the day. We 
> really hardly had any quiet patches with no-one to talk to.
>
> Hopefully next year with more volunteers (in the end it was me, Pete 
> Linnell and Matthew who were there) we can attempt a bigger event. Many 
> thanks also to Paul Stenning, for his very smart Windows based 
> 'theopendisc.org' DVD's of Open Source applications for Windows which 
> were a great help.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Julian
>
>
>