[FOSDEM] First time attendee

[Måns Rullgård]

Pascal Bleser <loki at fosdem.org> writes:

> On 2012-01-13 21:34:27 (+0000), Samantha Kosko <samantha at 10gen.com> wrote:
>> Hi... my name is Samantha and I am trying to finalize all of my companies
>> plans for FOSDEM and we are all first time attendees.  We have been
>> selected to have a stand and the event and wanted to get some feedback on
>> what we should do with giveaways and staff for the stand.
>
>> We have a limited number of people in EMEA that can attend and I want to
>> make sure that i am using my resources as best as I can.  If anyone has any
>> information they can help me with on this ... i would be forever thankful!
>
> Hi Samantha!
>
> Hm, well:
> - expected a *LOT* of people showing up at your stand
>
> - if you plan to bring along swag, in order to give you an order
>   of magnitude:
>   * most stands bring along stuff in quantities of 1000 items or
>     more
>   * we give out over 1500 booklets to visitors
>   * our estimation on the total amount of visitors is around
>     5000 (and that's a minimum)
>
> - a very large proportion of the visitors at FOSDEM are people
>   who are already contributing to open source projects in one
>   way or another (most of them hackers, I'd say) so rather
>   expect pretty technical or at least deeper questions and
>   discussions, certainly much more than "oh, what's MongoDB?" ;)
>
> - the atmosphere is very relaxed, you're amongst friends :)
>
> - in general, we recommand to have at least two people at a
>   stand at all times, if feasible; I'd recommend to plan some
>   rotation amongst your people, as everyone will have quite a
>   long list of sessions they would like to attend (we will have
>   between 300 and 400 sessions during the weekend)

All great points, but you missed one:

- come to the beer event on Friday evening if you can.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mans at mansr.com