Things we as a community should have ready when representing Plone at a conference:
- Case Studies hand out
- Some way to indicate people who use Plone
- A revamped large poster that is targeting towards business folks
- A separate large poster for developers, recommending the one used at europython
- A stand that actually holds the poster we have
- NO MORE STICKERS. People don't really want these. They don't know what plone is - why would they want a sticker?
- A talking points sheet, which instructs people what message to send depending on what person they are talking to. Include the answer to the oft asked question: so, what is plone? and my favorite for this conference "wait - how do you make money?"
- schwag - what do people want?: 1 Person specifically asked for a tshirt. Most people were hanging out mugs and things like that. We have no schwag that is sustainable and follows people. I'm not suggesting mugs, but we need some physical and persistent thing. One idea that was mentioned is USB sticks with a Plone demo on it. This would have to likely include a VM, and if they could be customized towards certain realms like education, government, intranet, or nonprofit, major win.
- Printed out list of US Plone providers. (or whatever country people are in)
- Printed out list of people who use plone
- A big poster in the background.
- Notecards
The main issue with the audience is that they, as a majority, are only familiar with the surface level notion of open source. These are people who think that open source means they hire a company who has open code. Not a single person understood why a foundation was necessary and there was a lot of mistrust because they didn't believe that we "don't make money". Instead of getting warm fuzzies about stories of people volunteering to fix the code, people were actually quite uneasy. There was only 1 person I think that was like "wow that is so fascinating". He was awesome.
The messages that struck chords with people (read: usually 1 person) were:
- Internationalization, in specific, R to L capability
- Security, but not necessarily as a selling point to buisness folks
- The Brazil gov story
- Non-profit
Points of confusion: Open source is hard to understand for some - they sincerely didn't understand "where the money comes from".