FSFE promotion on festival(s) on May 5th?

[Sam Geeraerts]

Jelle Hermsen wrote:
> conference, how much I'd like to do that. And more importantly I
> don't really see the use of preaching to the choir. It's nice to hook
> up with like-minded people, but is it really that useful to set up a
> booth at nluug?

I don't know much about NLUUG, including how free software minded it is. 
My experience is that the proverbial choir is usually not all that 
religious, but rather just there because they like singing. More 
specifically, many "Linux" geeks don't see a problem with non-free 
Nvidia drivers and have a Mac as a second machine. If they have heard 
about FSFE at all, they might mistake it for FSF and picture its members 
as beard-growing sandal-wearing Emacs-using RMS-worshipping pedantic 
zealots with bad hygiene who tell them off for having Adobe's Flash 
plugin installed.

Whether they've heard about FSFE or not, I think *nix-using geeks are a 
relatively easy battle to pick.

> There might be some geeks that haven't heard of the
> FSFE yet, but I think it's better to try to reach the public, raising
> awareness of free software, open standards. Deborah's idea is great
> in the sense that it will give us the ability to actually reach
> "common joe" and not just the tiny crowd of techies.

My own experience with trying to explain free software to Common Joe is 
that their eyes already glaze over at the word "software". I admit that 
I'm not great at explaining these things, but I do think that there's an 
extra barrier to cross with non-technical people. I don't think that we 
shouldn't bother with them, but it's a tougher job, or requires a quite 
different approach than with a geek crowd at least.