"One cannot not communicate", Paul Watzlawick
One of the main tasks of the Free Software Foundation Europe is to inform the public about Free Software and related topics. For this, it is essential to be present with a booth on tradeshows, fairs, expos, and other local events. Helping at such a booth is a good way to get active for Free Software. Booth volunteers talk to people to explain Free Software and answer their questions. Working as a booth volunteer means at the same time supporting Free Software, meeting interesting people, and having a lot of fun.
At every event, there will be experienced people from the FSFE present to support the booth volunteers, so it is not necessary at all to be an expert in every single aspect of Free Software. However, some basic knowledge about Free Software and the FSFE is helpful.
The purpose of this page is to help you organising a booth, or participating toa programmed booth. Before starting to think organising a new booth, you might want to consider helping to the organisation of an already programmed booth. Your help is important to us, we don't want it to be wasted!
=Time factor= How early in advance should you start organisation activities in order to effectively organise a booth? The most important factor is letting people know in advance, so that other potential volunteers can plan a participation to the event and help you. So, there are four steps/phases:
Communication phase: 8 weeks in advance Order Material and Volunteers coordination: 4 weeks in advance Volunteers reminder: 2 weeks Prepare material: 1 weeks
This may seem artificious or complicated to you but it's not the case! Most of those phases just require sending an e-mail to a mailing list or posting a new item to the website. Probably, besides the event itself, the most time-consuming activity is the preparation of the communication material.
Check out upcoming booths
All Fellowship events in our calendar, you can add different RSS feeds and import the events in the ical format.
Useful resources
Please help to improve the booth FAQ.
Those organising the booth might find the BoothCountdown helpful
Materials
ToDo
- create eye catching slide show
- create a map and show our Fellowship groups on it. Give people the chance to add themself to the map
- create better posters for the booth
language code and version control on leaflets