[Wolves] FOSS Talk Live

[Peter Cannon]

On 19/08/16 08:26, John Alexander via Wolves wrote:
> Adam of all people you should be first up to do a blog talk ;)Maybe we should organise one at a local pub ...save all the transit nightmare ;)

So in the heady days of running the podcast (The Dick Turpin Road Show) numerous people asked when we were going to organise something along the lines of LugRadio Live. To be honest I never thought we had the 'presence' to pull something like that off.

I loved OggCamp and like most of the community was sad to see it fade away even if most of us could see it coming two years before it happened. There is an inherent problem with all the "Open Source Events" nobody, even OggCamp sat down and thought about;

A. What they wanted to achieve (Other than the points I'll raise in a moment.)
B. Who is their target audience.

See imo most of these events have been targeted at Linux/Foss users, oh how people sucked through their teeth when Microsoft donated to LRL. In the good old days you could argue there was some value in that given a good portion of the attendees were novices across the board both in terms of the basics, anyone attended an install fest lately? to stuff like "Using Open Source Software at work" 12 years down the line (I'll use Ubuntu-nee-Canonical time frame) and even someone new to Linux only needs minimal hand holding these days.

LRL, OggCamp and FOSS Talk Live (from the pictures I've seen) have really been a 'meet and greet' for old friends this is why the likes of Red Hat and SuSE are not actively at these events. I and many others take the view that if your aim (A) is to attract new users, business adoption and or promotion of FOSS to wider audience then a couple of hundred (B) Linux users in a venue is not really achieving anything. In all honesty you'd be better off calling an event LUG Live because that's what they effectively are, a LUG meeting just with more people who probably know 80-90% of the people there.

I did tentatively have a discussion with Big Ron about setting something up in 2010 but as I say I dropped the idea just as quick as I toyed with it. Having said that just lately I've been thinking about it again. If I had the inclination I'd set up an event called CREATIVE COMMONER, yes that's the creative commons tagline but it is an awesome one because it plays on the word CREATIVE and the beauty of that is it can umbrella many things

FOSS
Raspberry PI/Arduino
Makerspace
Art
<Insert other discipline here>

You could target the Chamber of Commerce (Even though I think they're a waste of space) to get businesses to come to the event (Not necessarily donate). The benefit for them is exposure to software etc that they can use in their company either for cost saving or efficiency improvement. There is also the opportunity for meeting brilliant individuals as potential employee candidates.

Wolverhampton Uni might be willing to host it, they did after all host LRL. They too could benefit by promoting the Uni to attendees. Then there's the local schools and colleges who's students might be interested in 'something' on offer. Then there's local media for attracting Joe Public. Tell me ONE event that's been in a local rag over the years up and down the country? NOT ONE there's not even been a mention after the event for Pete's sake!

Why must only people wanting to learn about Docker, which they're NEVER going to use in their work environment, attend? Maybe a mum, dad or offspring would like to come along and build their own chair lift in a makerspace area controlled by FOSS running on a Pi?

I've attended EVERY OggCamp and I only missed one LRL and I can assure you. They're all the same, full of Linux people telling other Linux people stuff they probably already know.

*It's time for a change*

-- 
Regards
Peter Cannon

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