[Wolves] FOSS Talk Live

[Peter Cannon]

On 19/08/16 12:03, Mike Hingley wrote:
 
> I think if we're not careful any replacement for OggCamp will just end
> up repeating the same mistakes that Pete has identified here - and to be
> honest the description of the sort of things that Creative Commoner can
> encompass already look like some of the same elements that are in OggCamp

I agree, however we do need some of the core elements otherwise what's the point?

> My wife and I attended the first OggCamp in Wolverhampton.  She was
> thoroughly bored by the whole thing.  She never attended another one.
>  The whole event failed to connect with her.  She's not a coder.  She is
> computer literate - and is the sort of "Go-to" person where she works if
> they have a problem with the Ipad.  She knows about free software
> (because I bore her to tears talking about GNU/Linux and ubuntu) - but
> fundamentally she just doesn't care about any of it.

And that's the point right there. Your wife should be our target audience NOT YOU! So the event should have, I dunno, "automated Knitting" (What a sexist stereotype example?) said automated knitted is done by a program written in scratch "Hello there Mrs Hingley, see that jumper with the little fwuffy wabbits on you knitted for Mike? Did you know you can write your own knitting program? Here have a go......."

OggCamp did do some stuff in this sort of vein over the years and they were popular, who remembers the tee shirt re-factoring into bags and stuff? But they always seemed to be 'one visit wonders' for some reason. What we need is a FOSS event with a BarCamp mentality so for example at BarCamp Birmingham Adam gave a talk on weight loss. Nothing to do with open source or Linux and it went down a storm. At OggCamp 2013 a young lady gave a talk on "How not to get kidnapped" which was really insightful. Again, nothing to do with FOSS. My point is, we need to encourage people through the door with something that will interest them than has, potentially, some tenuous link to FOSS and drip feed it to them.


-- 
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Peter Cannon

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