[Foundation-l] Re: Report from Cebit

[Anthere]

thanks for the report Elian :-)
Seems to have been a very productive meeting ;-)

Elisabeth Bauer a écrit:
> Hiho,
> 
> a report for all who were not there...
> 
>  From 10th to 12th March 2005 Wikimedia was present at the world
> biggest computer fair, the cebit in Hannover, Germany. Our booth was
> located in the lovely neighbourhood of projects like Debian, KDE,
> Gnome and OpenOffice at the Linuxpark. Brockhaus was also present at
> Cebit, in the same hall like us. Unlike most of the other open source
> projects we had a whole booth for us, with a table for the
> presentations computer and leaflets. Decoration and Equipment was
> still scarce -- we used the posters left from [[FOSDEM 2005]], Nina
> provided her brandnew iBook as presentation computer.
> 
> Day one started with a prominent visitor at our booth: Jon Maddog
> Hall. And of course he instantly discovered a mistake in
> Wikipedia. Looking up his biography in the english wikipedia, he found
> his name spelled wrongly -- good occasion to fix this (edit summary:
> "spelled my name correctly"). When I logged in to move the page
> afterwards, I could see one more time how fast Wikipedia works: RickK
> had already moved the page to the correct title (okay, there was some 
> sort of redirect confusion...).
> 
> In the following time the booth crew, Mathias Schindler, Nina,
> Southpark (en:Zeitgeist), Marco Krohn and I were busy answering
> questions from visitors. Most knew Wikipedia already and were
> interested in basic questions like "How do you make sure that no
> nonsense stays in?". People also showed lots of interest in the CD,
> DVD and print versions. And of course, some wikipedians passed by,
> too. A lot of people came with Mediawiki related questions which we
> tried to answer as good as possible, sometimes with help from the devs
> on IRC. For the next fair, it would be good to have a developer at
> the booth.
> 
> In the afternoon, I held a presentation about Wikipedia at the
> Linuxpark forum. At six we closed down the booth and went together to
> the annual Wikipedia cebit meetup in the same old pub as last year,
> talking until late night about excellent articles, edit-wars, vfd (the
> usual wikipedia chitchat).
> 
> The following day, Presroi and I had an radio interview with a
> journalist from NDR and were running around a lot establishing
> contacts. We left some dutch wikipedia leaflets at the booth of the
> Netherlands and I grumbled about myself that I had no info materials
> in Arabic to distribute it at the booths of the Arabic
> countries. Cebit could have been a possibility for us to promote
> wikipedia in those countries with bad internet connectivity and reach
> people who actually have internet there.
> 
> Saturday, day three was supposed to be the busiest (with reduced 
> entrance fees for students) but was relatively quiet for us, with people 
> from berlinux passing by, inviting us to their next conference in Berlin 
>   and so on.
> 
> These are the lessons we learned for the next such events:
> 
> * Send out a press release at least one week before
> 
> * Make a list of things you want to achieve at the event and arrange
> appointments beforehand (We were _really_ lucky this time).
> 
> * Have a stand crew and a team of people who visit others. Minimum for
>   big events like Cebit are four people. It happened sometimes that we
>   were busy explaining wikipedia to a crowd of casual visitors and
>   behind was someone waiting with something important to say. Good to
>   be able to divide work then without having to cut one talk off.
> 
> * Have at least one person in the crew who can explain the technical
>   side and answer questions about mediawiki.
> 
> * create a wikipedia user account for the event and edit under this
>   user name. Like this, you can show features like the watchlist
>   without showing your private one and other wikipedians are
>   warned.
> 
> * Prepare for no sleep (five hours are real luxury).
> 
> * Don't forget your business cards, Repeat: Don't forget your business
>   cards. Ah, and make sure you don't run out fo business cards.
> 
> * a small bowl with gummibärchen or other sweets doesn't cost much and
>   is a nice gesture for visitors (idea stolen shamelessly from the KDE
>   people). You only have to make sure that the stand crew doesn't eat
>   them all.
> 
> * last but not least: for next year, we want a sofa and book shelves.
> 
> Pictures: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cebit_2005
> This report on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cebit_2005
> 
> greetings and good night,
> elia
> n