CGS 2008


 * Event Owner: Alex Mandel(wildintellect) and Landon Blake
 * When: 2-4 May 2008
 * Where: Chico, CA
 * What: Annual California Geographical Society Conference

We will be tabling for OSGeo at the California Geographical Society annual conference to spread the knowledge of FOSS tools in the local academic culture. This conference has high attendance from the Cal State University and Community College systems.

Budget
List of Items we need and proposed budget request from the Marketing team.

Note: Landon Blake can provide a table and a computer for the booth.

Brochures / Handouts

 * See the Marketing brochures etc at http://osgeo.org/visibility

Alex plans to print handouts and Kinkos on thursday before the meeting, what should he print?

Results
Volunteers - Alex Mandel, Michael Treichler, Stacey Ellis and Michele Tobias (We're all graduate students in Geography at UC Davis)

Kinkos goofed and we ended up with all color flyers, which looked way better and luckily didn't cost anything over what we paid for, black & white. I'm not sure they figured it out since we ordered online.

The audience was generally very receptive and friendly. There were only about 7 vendor exhibits, we looked sleek and professional and had a steady 2-4 people at the table for most of the time. We had a nice range of Professors, graduate, undergraduate, and grade school educators. Some community college but mostly CSU (Cal State University) and a few others.

While we had 3-4 laptops up and running apps and browsing the web aside from demonstrating features to some people most of this crowd just wanted to talk about what FOSS is, who was paying us, and what applied to their work. Some people were so excited we loaded copies of the flyers onto their flash sticks on the spot. It really helped to put out some signs saying "Free Geography/GIS Software" as our professional look had people perplexed at this particular event.

We gave out about 140 business cards with the major project names(Almost all of the 150 we made), the OsGeo slogan and website. About 40-50 QGIS flyers, 20-30 of Grass, OpenLayers, Education, GeoData, OSSIM and a few of everything else.