New subject: [LinuxTag 2009] Ideas and how to attract the audience.

23 Jun 2009


      Dear everyone,
LinuxTag is starting on Wednesday. There is now also a page in the
coreboot wiki [1]. Please feel free to edit it and spot things Peter and
I missed.
But there is still a problem I have, which I already wrote to Peter.
Am Dienstag, den 23.06.2009, 05:15 +0200 schrieb Peter Stuge:
...
Paul Menzel wrote:
...
My main problem is, what the main goal of the coreboot project is
at such a fair and if there is one, how can we reach this goal.
Last year I had the impression, that most people were thinking – if
they looked –: “Great! But it is too geeky for me and I do not
profit enough from it to try it out or to dig deeper into it.”
So how can we convince them to get into touch with it. (Try it out
with Qemu.) …
You make an excellent point. The goal is to show people that coreboot
exists. Some people will be potential users, maybe at businesses
making some kind of product, or interested individuals who like fast
boot times for their HTPC. Some of them may even become developers..
And some will just find the project interesting and hang around the
mailing list. Maybe they will eventually also contribute at some
point, but at the very least they might spread the word.
What are your opinions? Do you have suggestions of good ways to achieve
this goal?
Peter is going to bring flyers along, which serves the purpose to spread
the word about coreboot quite well. What could be displayed on the
monitor to catch the interest of people walking by.
I just thought of, that maybe there should be a section on the flyer—I
have not seen it yet— about how to contribute. And since a lot of people
do not know about firmware development or C (as myself), it would be
great to also list other tasks. I think, this would probably increase
the chance that more people get in touch with coreboot when listing
concrete issues, where they could help. (Maybe there exits a wiki page
already, because Carl-Daniel often wrote to the list about how to become
familiar with coreboot.)
So would could “normal” people do?
- Send flashrom -V to the list and test the operations on system, but
only if they have a backup path.
- The call from someone at the Ubuntu forum to send detailed hardware
information to the list was not seen as beneficial.
- Donations?
- Contact/Lobbying of hardware vendors?
- Art design? (Do we need a start screen or a layout for our web site?)
- Payload for a tool/interface like ordinary BIOS set up tools to set
certain options for coreboot during boot?
Sorry for the amount of questions. Maybe a wiki page “How to
contribute?” could be set up for this.
I am looking forward to your ideas. I have to go,
Paul
[1] http://www.coreboot.org/LinuxTag_2009