LinuxFest 2000 - Show Your Support

An Anonymous Coward writes: "When you are walking into a tradeshow and the first thing spoken is, 'I hear this thing is a flop,' you know you're in trouble. That about sums up my experience Friday at LINUXFest 2000. I know that there are more Linux users in the Kansas City community than this, and it would be nice to see some support. It would be nice to see a better showing Saturday, and perhaps Slashdot readers would be interested in Emmett's scheduled speech." I will be delivering a keynote, and it would be great to see you there. Admission's free. As far as the show being a flop, I'm writing a full feature on it so you can decide for yourself.

Comments

Sad, but true.

[Bruce Perens]

Go to the show on Saturday, the exhibitors especially would really like to see you.

Eric Raymond, Larry Augustin, and I were all there on Tuesday. We wanted to help out another independent show, lest IDG and Ziff-Davis get a lock on Linux trade shows. We did this for The Bazaar too, which worked out much better.

Greg, the promoter of the KC show, is a nice guy and he really cares, but it sounds as if he ran out of money and resources to promote the show, and he tried to do too much on his own. The two local Linux User Groups helped out, but there was little they could do - it sounds as if they were brought in much too late. I spoke on Tuesday morning, to 13 people. Apparently, the talk wasn't publicized sufficiently. Larry, Eric, and I sat at a table in a Kansas City restaurant on Tuesday evening, a $20/ticket event open to the public, and were undisturbed. Few in the area knew we were there. At least it was nice to have the chance to talk with Larry and Eric.

Sigh. I was hoping this would get better on Wednesday. I guess it didn't. I left Tuesday night to get back to the baby and didn't see the rest of the show.

Darn. There's no point in chastizing Greg, the exhibitors have no doubt already parbroiled him. Kansas City deserves a good Linux show and I hope we can make a better one next year.

Thanks

Bruce

As someone who lives in Kansas City....

[Randy Rathbun]

here is my take on the show. I have not been to it yet, but will mosey (see! I am from Kansas City!) over on Saturday.

Be that as it may, KC has some absolutely horrible shows. I am not talking bad - I am talking really bad. Every year there is some computer show that comes through town run by some outfit from Arizona. What kinds of high tech cool geek toys do they have on display?

Copying machines! Whoo boy! Just what I wanna see lots of. I am not joking either. Last time I went (1999), they had like 300 booths. There were ISPs in five or six of them, Apple had a decent sized booth, IBM was nowhere to be seen, MS was absent so I was unable to laugh at them, and other than one of the video production companies in town having a booth showing all their digital editing stuff, the rest of it was taken up with copier companies.

I think this is probably why folks in KC are not showing up at this thing, to be honest. It is a shame really. Lots of us just don't know what a good show can be like.

First I've heard

[TMLink]

I live and work in the KC area, and this is the first I've even heard about this event...that in itself my be a reason it's a flop. I'm sure that there's plenty of interrest here, but it wasn't promoted well (at all?), especially twords the people that would benefit most from it. It's hard to get a good turnout when nobody knows about it...