[Infopoint] Bracknell BCF event etc

[Tony Whitmore]

alan c wrote:
> Tony Whitmore wrote:
>>  alan c wrote:
>> > Tony Whitmore wrote:
>> >> I have precise figures and a neat graph I will make available for
>> >> you this evening.
>>  Here it is:
>>
> http://www.streetend.force9.co.uk/misc/infoart/2005-11-28-192113_1400x1050_scrot.png
> 
> Brilliant Tony, thanks. Have BCF seen this?

I shouldn't think so. However, if you want to show them you'd be
welcome. You should point out that these figures were not generated from
BCF events and that I would anticipate the BCF fairs to be busier. Also,
note that other InfoPoint organisers might not record this much detail
or information. Also please not that this graph is largely based on
fairs where we pay £10 or £15 for a large group of tables.

> What actually *has* been negotiated in the past with BCF? what were the
> details and what was the final outcome?

The deal was, although I hope Jono will correct me if I'm wrong, that
BCF would give free tables at their computer fairs for InfoPoint stands
booked in advance through Jono. That was the *initial* deal. It became
clear when we tried to book a Southampton fair that they couldn't
actually commit to giving us a table any more than a few days in advance
because they would rather give the tables to paying stall holders, which
is understandable. (The problem is that that made it very difficult to
organise a stand and arrange for people to staff it.)

So, we never made it to a BCF fair. I don't know who Jono struck the
original deal with. What appears to have happened is that BCF have
forgotten about the agreement, probably because no-one used it. (We were
the only InfoPoint team in the BCF region.) So whilst there is still,
technically an agreement in place, it's basically lapsed. What "we" need
to do is resurrect that deal if possible and reassert a point of contact
for the InfoPoint scheme with BCF.

It was whilst visiting a BCF fair that Hugo Mills and I got into
conversation with Jerry Pugh who told us about his smaller fairs. We
couldn't persuade him to give us a table for free but the tables are
much cheaper and we get a large group of them (usually two or three full
tables) for £10 or £15. You can see photos of the sort of area we
usually have on the HantsLUG gallery.

At some point before our first Jerry Pugh fair, I contacted Sussex LUG
as Jerry mentioned they have a stand at some of the other BCF fairs. I
established with them that they do not run InfoPoints and that they pay
full price for their tables. They were very open to me visiting to see
what they do.

>>  I should add that the initial set up costs would have been much more
>>  but a lot of blank CDs and printing was donated by LUG members.
> 
> The quantity of CDs does not seem to be very large though, and blank CDs
> can in theory be got quite cheaply now.

I'm more than prepared to go "open book" on any aspect of our InfoPoints.

Our costs for producing a CD (the Knoppix and OpenCD ones we produce)
worked out like this:

Disc			0.25
Duplication		0
Label			0.12
Jewel Case		0
Case Labels		0.29
CD label printing	0.03
Booklet printing	0.1
Tray Inlay printing	0.05

Total Per Disc:	0.84

Note that the CDs are reasonable quality ones from a spindle. The very
cheap unlabelled media have a habit of failing and don't run through a
commercial duplicator. Decent quality blanks do cost a few more pence
though. Alan Pope donated our initial set of blank CDs which helped to
offset some of the startup costs, but subsequent ones have been paid for.

Duplication was free: Alan Pope burnt them all by hand. (I now have
access to a commercial duplicator which I would probably use instead
because it's less work for Alan!)

The jewel cases were donated by another LUG member - when stocks are
exhausted we will have to pay for jewel cases.

The labels are quite a large proportion of the cost - we use Fellowes
media which give a nice professional look to the CDs. The CD labels are
applied by hand and we had a team of people making up jewel cases with
all the inlays at a LUG meeting.

The label printing was done for cost price by members, usually on a
colour laser printer which gave a very nice look to them.

So with a total of 84p production cost, I rounded this up to a pound.
This is a nice round figure and saves worrying about as much change on
the day. It is the £1 we charge people at our LUG meetings if they want
a CD. At computer fairs where we have to pay for the table we charge £2,
 £1 of which goes to the table hire. As you can see from the graph, we
don't always cover our costs at InfoPoints, but over the whole year we
have. At a BCF fair I would sell them for £1 if it was a completely free
table, or £2 if there was a small charge. I'm not sure what I would
charge if it was the full £35 per table but I suspect it would be more.

Other startup costs included coloured paper for our leaflets (donated
again by Alan) and the printing thereof (donated by Rob).

> If Infopointbanners are
> available great, but I do not have any to hand

Well, there isn't an InfoPoint banner shop. ;) Again these were made
using surplus from stalls. The lettering was donated by a LUG member and
I purchased the other parts from B&Q and knocked them up in my back
yard, including spending one evening sticking the letters on in the
liviing room! They cost just under £10 each to make.

> and as we agree,
> discussing and answering questions are valuable, I think more so than
> making (a large number of) CDs available.

One of my concerns is that if you are paying for a table, some part of
your mind will be aware of the need to sell CDs to cover the £35.
Perhaps the CDs will fly off the tables, perhaps not. £10 is a lot less
of a "risk" to cover if you don't sell enough CDs.

>>  You
>>  can see our initial setup costs took three InfoPoints to recover.
> 
> I expect to attend with rather basic things, including a laptop chained
> to my leg, and a an number  of small-ish posters, and copies of  a more
> or less standard information sheet wiht explanations and links for more
> information and download. and local and LUG contact details. If 
> enquireres are still interested, there will be CDs on offer in limted
> quantity, depending on how BCF react.

Yes, this is bascially what we had at our first InfoPoint, and is still
 what our stand is based around. I'm sure you've seen the pictures on
the gallery. We only ever have a "limited quantity" of CDs - you can see
from the figures that we don't need to take huge numbers along.

> How the other traders will react
> is not easy to predict at this stage, but from what I have seen, it is
> largely hardware on sale, not software.

Yes, that's what we've found. There is a software stall at the fairs we
go to, and they do have a couple of Linux CDs amongst their plethora of
Windows games etc. But it's mostly hardware, which complements our
stands nicely. It was great when Jim bought a laptop on one side of the
fair, came across to us and had Ubuntu running on it within half an hour!

I would suspect that most of the traders at the fairs we go to would be
at the Bracknell fair too. Again, visiting the fair in advance or
attending one of our InfoPoints would be a good way to get to know them
- we have got a few interested in Linux as a result, either personally
or with a view to pre-install.

> An advantage of not presenting myself as an efficient representative of
> a large and smoothly run national or global organisation is that no one
> is likely to feel threatened. Yes if I turned up mob handed with all
> sorts of professional looking display gear, there is an apparent
> conflict in asking people to believe I am really in it for 'love' not
> money!

I hope you don't think that we look corporate or professional at our
fairs! (Again, you can see from the photos that this is not the case.)
We've learnt a lot about not looking threatening to people and how not
to scare them off. I suppose we aim to look competent and friendly and I
think we hit that target.

> Tony is there any evidence that people who saw the infopoint, and/or had
> a CD, followed it up into linux in a longer term way? There has been an
> article online about this somewhere.

Well, as you can see in the archives of this list, we've had at least
two people who we met at InfoPoints come to LUG meetings, more than one
in both cases! In fact, one of the people now helps out with InfoPoints
too. We had one bloke at our last fair who brought his PC along to get
help installing Ubuntu on it (he had a nasty software RAID configuration
- fortunately Hugo was on hand to sort it all out).

In the smaller scale we have had a few e-mails looking for help and some
people have signed up to the mailing list. We have also chatted to a few
Linux users who weren't aware of the LUG and some long term list lurkers
who confessed to being members!

Of course, increasing LUG membership is a fringe benefit of running the
stands, but it's great to see people not only using Linux but getting
involved with the community around it too. It's what I find personally
most rewarding about running InfoPoints.

HTH,

Tony

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