12 June, 2012

Improved Support for Events

The openSUSE community introduced the Travel Support Program to support travelers to represent openSUSE at conferences and events. A few days ago the team announced a minor change in policy: besides travel costs, the team will also help with costs related to booths, entry tickets and marketing materials.

Entry tickets and booths

While most Free Software events have Free entry - either for everyone or at least for those staffing a booth or giving a talk, this is not always true. Also, some events charge even volunteer organizations for a booth. While we're not too fond of that, reality is one of those things you have to live with and thus this decision - we pay, but up to a reasonable limit.

Marketing materials

Another thing is marketing materials. While we ship tens of thousands of DVD's, flyers, posters and other things around the world each year, sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Sending 100 DVD's with some posters and flyers (worth about 10 bucks) to some countries can easily cost many times the value of what we send. Sometimes, customs give us an extremely hard time and try to charge for the 'value of the software'. In short - we need to be able to produce things locally. And now we can!



The openSUSE ambassadors can pick materials from our well stocked github repo or, of course, modify something there or even create their own.

Now go and spread the word!

Find a little more info in the announcement by the Travel Support Team and of course on the wiki page!

Yup, the travel support program is currently just sponsored by SUSE - we haven't figured out (still, I know) how to take donations from others - yet. But if you want to help out financially, talk to me or the travel support team, I'm sure we can work something out!

3 comments:

  1. Jos, the old restrictions still apply?

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  2. Do you also have translated material? For KDE we recently created a repo but we still do not have material in it. It seems people do not care sharing their promo material. How did you start it? do you have a policy about sharing stuff?

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  3. @Tomaz: restrictions, as in?

    @Annma: after the English materials are made, we put them in source form in Git then ask people to translate. This works quite well.

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