Beautiful --thank you Daniel! Amazing work. Thanks to you and everyone involved. We certainly appreciate your collective efforts.
Here's to the next event :^) Warmly, Sally [From the mobile; please excuse top-posting, spelling/spacing errors, and brevity] ----- Reply message ----- From: "Daniel Gruno" <humbed...@apache.org> To: <dev@community.apache.org> Cc: "pr...@apache.org" <pr...@apache.org> Subject: FOSDEM summary Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2016 04:33 Hi folks (cc press@), Thank you so much for an amazing FOSDEM last week! This was the first time the ASF has had a presence as a foundation, but even though this showed a bit, I think we had very productive interactions with people (never a dull moment!) and showed them what the ASF was about. This was also the first time we had the opportunity to showcase our new visual identity, which was very well received and was quite the talking point in many a conversation. I'd like to extend my most sincere thanks to especially Alexander Bezzubov, Andrus Adamchik, Michael & Mechtilde Stehmann and Sharan "Super Trouper" Foga for their tireless efforts at the booth. I'd also like to thank Roman, Claude, Greg and Rich for lending a helping hand when needed. We totaled 18 hours at the booth (plus setup) during the two days (10 + 8) and spoke with...well, a LOT of people about the foundation and its projects. We also had many interactions with other foundations and companies about our project and theirs (and how they could work together). While I was mostly sitting _behind_ the booth, I also got the opportunity to take a few photos of it, which can be seen at https://imgur.com/a/8beqB As for swag, I am both pleased and surprised to say we managed to run out completely _2 hours before FOSDEM ended!_. We gave away more than 800 powered-by stickers (760 or so), a few hundred project stickers, 40 t-shirts, 100 pens, 50 key chains, 200 fridge magnets, 50 beer coasters, a few mugs and around 30 badges. We clearly need more swag for next FOSDEM ;) For the nicer items, we came up with a rule; "One conversation equals one free item", which worked super well. Compared to other conferences, even ApacheCon, we had a super busy booth, and only rarely had some free time without anyone asking us a question about the foundation and/or projects. We also had a nice cooperation going with the OpenOffice team, who decided to stay for a bit longer (and thus fill some of the big booth, so we didn't have to be 4 ASF people at it all the time, which was nice). As for the lessons learned, we definitely need to start organizing earlier next time, and get more of the prominent projects to join us - we especially had a lot of queries about Mesos and Spark at the conference. We would also really appreciate it if the foundation could send Melissa (or someone else) to be there in an official capacity. Doing this strictly as volunteers made us a bit jumpy as to who will watch over what if one has to go to a talk. We also desperately need one or more brochures about the foundation and its projects!!! The giant ASF banner has been passed on to the Stehmanns and will be used in other conferences in Europe. With regards, Daniel.
