[us-marketing] OSCON: Conference wrap-up + big thanks to our volunteers!

Hi all,

OSCON -- the O'Reilly Open Source Convention -- wraps up today in Portland, OR:
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/content/home

The expo hall closed yesterday, but there are still some sessions and
other activities continuing at the Oregon Convention Center until this
afternoon. In the expo hall the LibreOffice booth was flanked by our
friends at the Software Freedom Conservancy on one side, and Wikimedia
on the other:
http://sfconservancy.org/
http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Italo and Simon Phipps were both present at OSCON, as were two amazing
local LibreOffice booth volunteers, Robin Haberman and Scarlett Clark.
Having a solid team turns booth duty from a drudge of long days into a
much happier experience. Between the volunteers, Italo, and I, we
talked to hundreds of visitors, gave out dozens of brochures, taught
people about some new LibreOffice features, and even did a little bug
triaging!

I held a BoF on Tuesday regarding collaboration between FOSS projects
and FOSS-friendly orgs, and got a number of different people from
different aspects of FOSS and event planning to show up, including the
ever-helpful Bill Wright of LinuxFest NW. We'll continue our
discussion on the Community Leadership Forum, as well as planning
BoF's at Fossetcon (Orlando, FL) and SeaGL (Seattle, WA):
http://www.communityleadershipforum.com/t/collaboration-among-foss-projects-and-foss-friendly-orgs/347
http://fossetcon.org/
http://seagl.org/

This was the first conference where we had a projector at the booth,
and it worked out really well. It was small, portable, easy to set up
and tear down, and versatile in what it could display. I tried a few
projection surfaces, but one of the best visual choices was a matte
white shower curtain (grommets included). With such a large projected
area, we could quickly display a new message on the back wall of our
booth or demo some features of LibreOffice like Hybrid PDFs to a
conference attendee.

When the UK government announced on Tuesday that they were
standardizing on ODF and PDF, we quickly typed up that information in
LibreOffice Writer and had it displayed for all to see. Visitor after
visitor to our booth would ask "Is that true?" or "Wow! Is that the
entire country?", giving us the perfect opportunity to engage with
both existing and potential new users in a more personal, one-on-one
fashion.

I took this opportunity at OSCON to promote the possibility of holding
a LibreOffice hackfest in Portland, OR next year, and to collect names
and email addresses of individuals interested in participating. All
told, we have about 30 people on the current list, with a handful of
people connected with universities or programming labs who expressed a
desire to invite multiple people from their group.

tl;dr - OSCON was great, our volunteers are awesome, and we'll be back
-- possibly with a hackfest -- next year!


Cheers,
--R

-- 
Robinson Tryon
LibreOffice Community Outreach Herald
Senior QA Bug Wrangler
The Document Foundation
qubit@libreoffice.org

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