Yesterday the Danish LoCo team had a successful day in Århus. Århus is the second largest city in the country, and home to the biggest shopping mall here in Denmark, called Bruuns Galleri.
Armed with our good spirits, laptops, CDs and flyers for handout, we managed to talk to a lot of people, and hand out a lot of CDs and info flyers.
Especially the Eee Top touch screen with edubuntu installed was a hit with the kids. And when parents saw their kids doing basic arithmetic training while playing games, they were very easy to start a conversation with.
In general it was not hard to start conversations with people, and after mentioning the price and the general lack of viruses, most people were very interested. My rough guestimate is that we managed to hand a CD and a flyers with more info to 100 people and that we managed to talk to quite a few more.
This is definitely a thing that we can do again, and it doesn’t have to be linked to a release. Any weekend will do, and I really hope that we can manage events like this one again soon. Now that we know what is required, it should be fairly easy to plan and run events like this anywhere in the country. All we need is an agreement with a local mall (or similar), CDs, flyers and 6-8 people (with computers). This may be done with the help of a local LUG or similar, if need be.
After talking with ‘ordinary’ (what ever ordinary is) people about Ubuntu yesterday, my feeling is that People and Ubuntu are ready to be introduced, and we just need to go out there and do it!
As an added bonus, we actually had help with the CD handout all the way from Romania yesterday. Manuel from ubuntu-ru.org came down to help out. Of course he didn’t come all the way from Romania just to join us, he is an exchange student living in Århus, but still, I thought it was very brave of him to show up (and I hope the birthday party he was attending later turned out great).
Kim took a lot more pictures and Carsten also has pictures (and a description of the day, in Danish).
After the event a few of us went to the local PROSA office, where we were allowed to borrow their canteen and have some pizza. We also shared opinions about what we wanted to do about the next Ubuntu Live! – Ubuntu Release party here in Denmark. The next one, 10.04 is a LTS, and as such really invites for a grand celebration. We haven’t make any final decisions, but if only half of the ideas we talked about yesterday get carried out, it is going to be Big!
