Re: Fwd: Re: [Fsfe-uk] Richard Stallman 1st seminar

[Marc Eberhard]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 03:43:40PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> Unfortunately, lots of people are unaware of the AFFS. But, the UK free
> software community extends much further than the "Linux User Groups".
> For example, I talked briefly to a London Perl Monger, who also hadn't
> heard of AFFS. I think our (AFFS') new year's resolution probably ought
> to be some committed, planned, marketing activity. This is definitely a
> problem we are aware of, though.

Very true, indeed. Maybe we will find some time over this year's christmas
break to browse a bit through all the good stuff at gnu.org, fsfeurope.org
etc and turn that into HTML/PDF for our web pages. As I agreed to talk at
the local Birmingham LUG in January, I probably have to do this anyway.

The other way to make us better known would be some kind of popular service.
Let's say: Enter your postcode on our web site and get the closest LUG or
company offering Free Software products and services. Don't know, how much
work it would be to get something like this off the ground.

A news ticker and calendar page with frequently updated upcoming events
about Free Software might be attractive too.

The key issue is clearly the amount of time to keep these "services"
running. Maybe we should do a small poll to see how much time we can commit
on a more or less firm basis to these projects? Any volunteers willing to
offer a spare hour per week?

> Funnily enough, this is along the lines of what we're doing :) At Linux
> Expo in London, one thing we were asked quite often (esp. by
> journalists, it seemed) was whether or not there was specific 
> information they could use in future articles - although there is a
> fair amount of information around, much of it isn't obviously applicable
> to the UK (although it usually is), and isn't hugely accessible. 

I fully agree. Before making a lot of noise, we should have something in our
hands. Thus I would first try to get a stock pile of documents and then
start to make them widely known. If we attract a lot of attention now, we
might just disappoint people and they will remember that later on.

We should also remember, that we wanted to produce an advertisement page for
AFFS in case we are offered a free-last-minute-page in a magazine again.

Bye,
Marc
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