On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 23:18 -0800, Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 13:03 -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:
How did SCALE go? Can someone write up a synopsis? Are there any pictures?
No, no pictures. John and Jon wouldn't let me out of the booth enough to take any ;)
Whoa!
I think that it went very well. We got awesome booth placement right between Google and LTSP, both high draw projects. Plus the LTSP guy even had Inkscape on his systems. Google of course had overflow, which allowed us to chat them up.
Awesome!...It would be cool to get a link up to the photos off of flickr or something for the main Inkscape page.
They had almost 1000 people check in at the conference. I printed 250 copies of each of the fliers I posted here earlier, and judging by how many we had left I'd say 150-200 people came through the booth. I had originally planned on turning each into a little tutorial, but there really wasn't room in the booth.
Yes, we need to get some generic Inkscape cards printed up that we can get mass produced for cheap through vistaprint.com. Ted, you have nice Inkscape cards :) Maybe you can hook us up with your design :)
We had two computer set up running Ubuntu and Inkscape. They were both 500 Mhz machines, which I think was a plus because whenever people asked about performance we could just point to them. Wacom let us borrow two Intuos Tablets (which was awesome of them) so that became a draw to the booth, though I think some people thought that you couldn't use Inkscape without a tablet. John Tabor brought a projector, so we used that as one of the monitors so that we had something more visible for large groups of people, and also people walking by. I think that was a huge plus.
Awesome!
I was surprised by how many people hadn't heard of Inkscape. There was also a large contingent of people who had heard of it, but weren't familiar with what it is. At the same time, we also had people coming through the booth who were very familiar with Inkscape and wanted to thank us all for the project existing, though they had a few gripes (like printing). Chris DiBona even came to the booth to check on the Google Summer of Code projects -- he seemed happy with the progress.
Excellent! Word has it they are doing the Summer of Code again, so hopefully we will get even more spots in their queue.
Probably the funniest story was from the gal across the hall from us at Bitrock. It is a small startup doing installers. She came over to talk to us as she had been assigned to do the fliers for their booth, and given Photoshop to do them in. The fliers were okay, but when I knew that they were done in Photoshop, I found them very impressive. Also, the copy of Photoshop she was given was a Spanish version, and she didn't speak Spanish. So, she was thrilled about Inkscape, and the fact that we have an English translation :)
hahahahah
I think the most inspiring stories are the educational ones. There seems to be several groups of people refurbishing older computers and giving them out to families who can't afford them. They're usually given without software licenses, or if they get any, it's only for Windows. So they're looking for applications that are useful for these machines. I think that they were all impressed by the abilities of Inkscape, and excited to integrate them into their projects.
Overall, a good conference. I think Inkscape was represented well by John Tabor, Jon Cruz, Josh Andler and myself. We also had a good time hanging out together.
--Ted
Awesome guys! That is so great you all got together for this! I'm so jealous. Seems like SCALE will be a major place for Inkscapers together in the coming years. Maybe we should just plan on hitting that one every year :)
Jon