Disclaimer: These are my opinions and doesn't reflect that of FSF in particular. Also, this was my first time at Linux Asia 2006, so I am not aware of tradition and expectations towards the event.
Thanks to the good people at FSF, Kerala, we got handouts for SPACE and FSF in time (one day before the show). The SPACE handouts are all out, the FSF one's are still remaining. Sameer had gotten the posters and stickers printed well in advance. There were plans about T-shirts and CDs... but they remained plans. Well, next time.
FSF India had 2mx2m space in the Org mela. The Org mela itself was unconveniently located at an unsheltered area; well away from where the main events were taking place. However, as early birds on Feb 8, we got ourselves a stall that was very visible from the entrance. This had its own benefits... Quite a few people, three to be precise, asked me whether the Org mela was a part of the main event.
Besides that, our stall was an easy target for freebie mongers. There was a small card that was circulated with stall numbers on it. Get it signed/stamped at at least 15 stalls and get a freebie. Guess what? Stalls in the Org mela had no stall numbers at all! They weren't fetured on the stall directory or the stall map.
General visitors to the stall included young students who wanted to do something on Linux but had no idea what; and middle-aged to old managers who knew that Linux runs somewhere in their organization but no idea of exactly where. I'd say 95% of people that came fell into these categories easily. People who knew about FSF was quite surprised to find an FSF stall. These guys got the GNU sticker.
The rest 5% were uber-clever people from the Fedora stall... with the general opinion that FSF is all advocacy, and that we should do some projects for community benefit. They were right, but had no reason to cry about it. There is still quite a lot of confusion around. I'll clear it for one last time: FSF _IS_ advocacy. And yeah, we do projects... please head to http://gnu.org.
Rahul Sundaram (Fedora) in particular gave a good suggestion of keeping a list of ongoing projects on a very visible URLs where people can get engaged. Someone (sorry I don't remember who) said that we should keep printed manuals for sale.
I guess we were quite succesful in showing the 95% of the audience the differences between Open Source and Free Software. It was a good opportunity to tell how the GPL works, why there so few software companies for India's one billion+ population and how a few people got filthy rich. As far as fellowship and donations go, two people wanted to hand over cash... we asked them to go the URL at http://fsf.org.in/ instead. Cash corrupts!
The FSF stall had quite a lot of people behind it: Sameer Ingole (_strike_), Vinod Ganjre, Bir Chandra Sanasam and Milind Paralkar. These guys stuck to stall even after being sponsored to attend the Tech Talks at the event. A special mention goes to Nikhil Prabhakar (nipra). He took a lot of effort to start the show early in the morning.
However, there were a few times when the stall did get left unattended: lunch and private sessions with the Gurus (Knopper and Shuttleworth) with the rest of the guys from ILUG-Delhi.
We were expecting Bhaisampayan to come and talk on Django. His last minute ditch wasn't going to go down well. Ramki and I made sure that Indranil Das Gupta utilized that space and gave a talk on the Free Software Philosophy. Unfortunately, I got stuck in traffic and couldn't attend the talk personally, but people spoke highly of it. Indranil and Ramki deserve kudos for being available at the last moment and saving the day.
I was expecting to talk on Free Software in Education. Things turned bad at the last moment... made a presentation in distress and tight schedule... got no intimation of when and where the talk will be held... concluded no talk better than a bad talk... shelved the talk.
Due to the event's extreme commerical nature I had a set kind of quality expectations in my mind. Many people (including me) felt it was a let down. It probably didn't get the audience for the hype. If there was any, only a few came down to the Org mela.
Still, I'd say it was worth the effort as what the FSF and we had to say did change quite a few opinions. Also most of the 95% had a misconception of Free in Free Software equals Free Beer. Some had used GNU/Linux without knowing a thing about GNU or FSF for that matter. So our, handouts, discussions and talks did have a shattering effect. From my personal experience, this is a good thing. A paradigm-shift in one persons thinking goes on to affect at least 10 more people.
With this, I'll repeat Dr Nagarjuna's words: "We'll go wherever we get a chance to tell people about our efforts". Our participation in the event wouldn't have been possible without his encouragement at the right time. Further, we should always keep events like FOSS.IN, GNUnify and Linux Asia 2006 in our radar and participate regularly with even better planning and preparation.
Stall Pictures (thanks to Karunakar): 0. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/271_7153 (Org Mela Area) 1. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/271_7156 (FSF Stall - Bir and Vinod) 2. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/272_7273 (Me, Sameer, Vinod and Milind)
Warm regards,
ah