Spreading the Word on the Geeko - Support is Back!

Spreading the word about our project has again become a little bit easier. As announced during the Opening Keynote at oSC14 the reimbursement program for locally produced materials is BACK!

We would like to thank Jim Henderson, who will lead the team, Shawn Dunn, and Alexandros Vennos for volunteering their time to manage the requests. The program is funded with up to $200 US per event with a limit of $2000 US per quarter. The initiative is no limited to events as in small local conferences. If you need material for a local LUG meeting or if you can produce material for a “permanent” display of openSUSE in a University or other public place of interest use this program.

How does it work?

The process is outlined in the wiki and will share the Travel Support Program application. Basically you will need to submit a request through the application prior to the time of need. The team will evaluate the information and get back to you in a reasonable amount of time. The team may also decide that it may be worth sending out a booth box instead of producing material locally. If you accept the booth box the request will be handled for you if booth boxes are available at the time. After you have approval you can go ahead and produce the material for the event/promotion campaign. Once the event is completed provide a report, blog post on lizards or your own blog for example and submit your receipts. That’s it. For permanent displays, the “event” is obviously “never” over, thus you’d just submit your receipt after you setup the display (hang up the posters), send along a picture and some advertisement, possibly on social media and that’s it.

We tried to keep things as simple as possible while still assuring that there’s some verifiable bang for the buck for our project. After all having posters hanging in someone’s basement does not hep us find more users or contributors.

What else?

A word on the booth boxes and larger events. A list of events where we would like to have people represent our project is in the works and will soon appear on the wiki. Booth boxes for those events have been set aside. Keep an eye out for an announcement about the events list and a call for advocates to represent the project. As a hint, OSCON is happening from July 20-24 in Portland Oregon and we have no one yet organizing a local team to show off openSUSE.

The local production reimbursement program is live and you can start using it today. As we are just starting out there are bound to be some rough edges, thus please be patient, provide as much feedback as possible about the process and the handling of things to allow everyone involved to improve the initiative for everyone that might want to take advantage of it.

Go and spread the word about openSUSE and Have a lot of fun…