[libreoffice-marketing] CeBIT 2014 impressions

CeBIT 2014: the community presenting itself in Hannover

March is usually one of the busiest months of the year, at least for 
those of us located in Germany. Quite a chunk of events in parallel - 
CeBIT in Hannover, Linux-Infotag in Augsburg, and Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, 
to name a few - mark the beginning of the trade show season.

While it has agreeably sized down the past years, CeBIT still is the 
major event to attend and to present ourselves. Thanks to the 
organization of especially Thomas Krumbein from Freies Office 
Deutschland e.V., we once again had a beautiful, shared booth, about 16 
m² in size, where also FrODeV and Collabora presented themselves.

Thanks to Thomas' experience, everything was extremely well prepared - 
flyers, brochures, flags, we even had a green floor and green 
LibreOffice balloons!

CeBIT hash a rather mixed audience. While every year the trade show 
organizers claim "more business people" - it feels as it should be about 
180% already... - there are also quite a few private end-users, students 
and students around. Talks at CeBIT are usually very worthy, and we even 
got to know about one rather large migration project going on at a 
pretty known corporation, which has not been made public yet. Plus, not 
to forget, many people stop by to congratulate and thank us for all the 
work we do, and showing us their appreciation for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice was also represented at the "Special Conference Open 
Source", as they call it, a public forum with talks and lectures around 
open source, open standards and free software, which is organized by 
Medialinx (formerly Linux New Media). Italo gave a talk about "Migrating 
to LibreOffice: a Reference Protocol", and I explained the legal setup 
of TDF, with its boards and bodies, which was received very well.

As usual, we shared a private appartment - something that is quite 
common at CeBIT, where regular hotels can easily cost a few hundred € 
per night (!), as essentially all Hannover is prepared for the major 
event of the year.

Even if that saved us a lot of costs, CeBIT still is one of the more 
expensive trade shows, not only owed due to its length (it lasts from 
Monday to Friday, used to be even longer in the past), but also due to 
the high costs of building a booth, renting a space, and of course 
getting people in to Hannover. In comparison to other events, there are 
only a few free project spaces available, and those are too small for 
us, so I am happy Thomas took over the burden to plan and organize the 
booth for us.

Still, being there is a must, to see others, and of course, to be seen. 
Talks to potential adopters yield a wide interest in LibreOffice, with 
rather concrete questions asked, and good contacts are made - so I am 
very much looking forward to CeBIT 2015!

Florian

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