Report on LDP at Montreal

[David Lawyer <dave@lafn.org>]

The LDP was present in force at the Linux Expo in Montreal, Canada
(April 10-12, 2000).  Six LDPers attended and manned out exhibit booth
there:
3 from France: Guylhem Aznar, Aranud Claden, and Xavier Salanie
2 from the USA: Gregory Leblanc and David Lawyer
1 from Canada: Gary Lawrence Murphy

Since most people in Montreal speak French, it was nice to have French
speakers at our booth.   Although our booth was off to the side and
not in the main traffic stream, it was still fairly well attended and
we gave out over 350 half-sheet brochures telling about the LDP.  We
also displayed printed examples of HOWTOs but unfortunately visitors
sometimes thought they were handout sheets and took the first page.

Was it worthwhile?  If one compares the time and money spent to attend
against the benefit to the LDP, then it wasn't worthwhile, especially
in view of the fact that we had six people there.  But since we had so
many people there and only one or two was needed to man the booth,
there was time to visit the other exhibits and attend talks.  Thus it
may have been worthwhile if one considers the benefit to the
individuals of attending.  There was press coverage of the Expo and I
don't know if we were included.

There were also talks given by us, but attendance was poor (only
several people outside of the LDP) since it was not in the printed
schedule.  MandrakeSoft paid for the airline tickets (and hotel bills
?) of all LDP attendees except for Gary Murphy from Canada.

Should we go to future expos?  I think so provided we do it better
next time.  We needed some large banners to put up at our booth even
though the expo had put our name in bold letters above our booth (and
we put up some sheets with the Linux penguin on it).  Also it would
have been nice to have had some terminals displaying our documentation
so that people could sample it.  However, we would not want people to
spend a lot of time reading the documents there as they could do this
elsewhere (at their home or office).  

We did get at least one comment regarding documents being
out-of-date.
-- 				David Lawyer


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