[TCMUG] Thank you for supporting the FOSS4GNA / OSGeo booth at MN GIS/LIS

[David William Bitner]

Thanks to everyone here for supporting the FOSS4GNA / OSGeo booth at the
Minnesota GIS/LIS conference last week. A particular thanks for the
financial and materials support from SharedGeo, Houston Engineering,
Farallon Geographics, Flat Rock Geographics and Applied Geographics.

We passed out nearly 50 buttons, several hundred FOSS4GNA "save the date"
cards, and 90+ OSGeo Live DVDs. We had a rotating slide show on the big
monitor showing many examples of Open Source products and examples of where
these products are being used. While at the booth many came by ranging from
students who had no idea what the term "Open Source" meant to seasoned GIS
professionals who thought that you had to be a die hard programmer in order
to use FOSS solutions. One of the main comments that we heard was "but we
already have an enterprise ESRI license" to which it was great to have so
many folks who had turned to FOSS solutions for flexibility, stability,
scalability and performance despite having an ESRI license in hand already.

There was certainly a lot of buzz that we were able to gain and many people
who had not heard of either OSGeo or the FOSS4G conferences who seemed very
excited to have this conference coming to their back yard.

As we look towards possibly trying to reach out at other events working
towards FOSS4GNA and to potentially continuing this booth for OSGeo at
MNGISLIS in the future, if anyone has any comments that can be used to help
make these activities more successful (including how we can better
engage/support businesses that can help to support these events for us),
please let's try to capture that now and get it into a wiki or something.

Thanks again for all your help in putting this together!

Cheers,

David

-- 
************************************
David William Bitner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/tcmug/attachments/20121008/2340f00d/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 20121005_005.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 822386 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/tcmug/attachments/20121008/2340f00d/attachment-0001.jpg>