[Planning-en] Report from Dubbo

[Andrew Swinn]

Howdy all,

Well I must say we had an excellent Software Freedom Day.

Our day was spent at one of our local shoppings malls with a display 
that I had been organising during the week. It basically consisted of 4 
computers setup with Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Damn Small Linux, a 
projector hooked up to the Ubuntu machine running the Blender Siggraph 
Demoreels and the occasional other video we had. There was also a 
noticeboard that had various information leaflets for people to read.

We had a little bit of press help promoting the event earlier in the 
week. One of our local free newspapers, the Dubbo Photo News, published 
a small article on Thursday. Our local prominent AM radio station, 2DU, 
did and interview with myself earlier in the week which had some good 
results as a number of people mentioned hearing it. The Dubbo Photo News 
photographer visited us on Saturday to take a heap of photos and get 
some information and they will be running it as a major article in next 
weeks paper.

The day started with about 200 Ubuntu CDs, and I also had a heap of 
blank CDs which I was using to burn copies of the Open Source Free CD 
for people. I think we gave away around half the Ubuntu CDs and about 20 
odd OSFCDs.

There was lots of passing interest in our display and there were a large 
number of computer professionals that were very interested, a few system 
admins, an IT teacher/admin from a local high school, and others. Over 
the entire day there was not one negative comment regarding open source 
or Linux, everyone was most positive and there were certainly lots of 
average people quite interested as well.

Our club (Dubbo and District Computer Club) got a good lot of promotion 
and we are expecting to get a few new faces at our next meeting which we 
have lined up as a workshop to do a bit of a Linux installfest and to 
teach the basics of the Linux CLI.

I shall be putting together a page of photos at some stage tonight.

I hope everyone else had a day as successful as ours was.

Cheers,

Andrew Swinn
Dubbo Team