[vox] Writer in the Workplace Conference wrap-up

[Bill Kendrick]

[Note: Posting to both LUGOD's 'vox' and SacLUG's 'lug-nuts']


Today, members of SacLUG and LUGOD staffed a booth at the annual
'Writer in the Workplace' conference, which was put together by the
Sacramento chapter of 'the Society for Technical Communication' (STC).

It was attended by what seemed to be _at_least_ 300 people from all around
the area (including the Bay Area and beyond).  They apparently had 15 seminars
going on during the event, so people were kept pretty busy.

They still had time to come wander around 'the Marketplace,' which is where
we had our booth.  Other organizations and companies I recognized included
MacNexus (the Sacramento Mac users group), MacOnline (a Macintosh store),
CSUS, and UC Davis.  There had to have been over a dozen booths there.
A few were publishers, a few were companies touting their tech-writing
software applications.


The booth was staffed by Mike Simons and myself, from LUGOD, Brian Lavender
and Mike Machado of SacLUG, and Paul Miller, who's seen regularly at
LUGOD, RoseLUG and probably SacLUG as well.  (He was there representing
OpenOffice.org, as usual :^) )


LUGOD brought our demo computer running Debian/Linux and a variety of
applications (Mozilla, The Gimp, OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc.).

Brian from SacLUG brought his laptop, also running Debian, but which also
had CrossOver Office installed, with Microsoft Word and MS Internet Explorer.


LUGOD brought copies of GNUWinII, a CD with a collection of Open Source
software compiled for Windows.  (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Perl, Apache... you name
it!)  Thanks to Pete Salzman and, especially, Rick O'Shaughnessy, for
getting these discs put together, especially in such short notice!

SacLUG brought copies of Knoppix 3.2, a bootable 'demo' Linux CD.
Thanks to Brian and Mike M. for burning the discs!  (And for giving the
remainders to LUGOD to give out at some of our upcoming events.)


We also brought flyers, of course.  I created a 'What Is Open Source?'
document, similar to the content used in our slides to the California 4-H
kids last fall.  I also put together a sheet listing local Linux Users Groups
(SacLUG, LUGOD, RoseLUG, CSLUG, CVALE, as well as some Bay Area LUGs, which
came in handy for folks who came from way out-of-town for this.)

I brought some LUGOD-info handouts, and Brian brought some about SacLUG.
Finally, I brought a ton of flyers for LUGOD's upcoming Oracle and IBM visits!


Fwhew!  You've probably already deleted this, but if you've read this far,
I'll sum it up by saying it was pretty successful.  I was surprised as to
how much interest there was in Linux from people who are sadly forced to
stick to Microsoft Windows (not even Macs, it seems!) for their jobs.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered, and to the folks from the STC for letting
us have a booth and partake in the free food the registered attendees were
getting.

They'll be doing this again next March, but it will be bigger (regional;
so we'll get folks from Hawaii), and take place at UC Davis, rather than
American River College.

We told them we're interested... of course. :)

-- 
root@lugod.org
http://www.lugod.org/
Linux Users' Group of Davis

PS - I'll put some photos online, once I get them off of my Zaurus.