We have the opportunity for a GNOME stand at LugRadio Live again this year, so I’m wondering if there is anybody out there willing to volunteer to help out, or just hang around at the stand during the day. But wait there’s more… I don’t want to organise another boring exhibition stand for GNOME, I want to organise something more exciting, or nothing at all…
As GNOME stands at exhibitions go, LugRadio Live presents an even bigger problem than other exhibitions. Everybody knows what GNOME is already, and are probably not that interested in finding out about the latest features because they’ll be relying on their GNU/Linux distribution of choice for that (or none of the new features are all that interesting, take your pick).
What can we do instead of just telling people about GNOME? Can we get people involved in GNOME somehow? We need as many people as we can to keep the project alive, so the question gradually becomes:
How can we make use of exhibition space to get people engaged in the GNOME project?
One way to engage the community is to set up “Hate/Love” boards like we did at LinuxWorld that allow people to express their feelings about GNOME. One step further than this is actually collecting enough information to file bugs on behalf of people who don’t know how to do this already.
Are there other things we can be doing to make better use of the time and space available at events like LugRadio? Can we go further and help people to start contributing to the GNOME project? If so, how? Comments welcome on this blog, by e-mail or to either gnome-uk or the GNOME marketing mailing lists.
You could have a section of the Love/Hate board titled “Dear Lazybugs,”
🙂
Is there anything in Gnome Love that could be split into bite-sized pieces to be done in 15-minute increments? Like, bring in an easel, pick a few missing Tango icons, and go from sketching a few ideas to finalizing, digitizing, and submitting a new icon? That would be small (yet rewarding) interactive demo of a full contribution cycle. And of course make sure everyone involved in the demo gets their name in the submission so they get recognition.
You could also do a similar demo (maybe at the same time) with cleaning up a few paragraphs of documentation.
I think 15 minutes would be enough time to build some interest in someone who was borderline (or, I think more likely, interested but not motivated enough to contribute otherwise) to understand how easy and fun it is to add to the project. Yet it’s not such a small period of time that it’s easily forgettable.