Re: Booth Swag

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 10:37 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Josh,
>
> > Hmm to me it does. At least in comparison to other things. If we really
> > think we can't get good donations for USB sticks, I question the
> > expense. Especially when (as you say and are correct) we already
> > generate good donations, and feedback from other less expensive but
> > equally useful items.
>
> Well, then we're back to CDs, yes? Since we are a free software project, we
> really do want to hand out a "copy" of PostgreSQL.

Well, no we really don't :). Frankly I would rather hand out a copy of
Ubuntu, which Canonical will give us for free and say, just type apt-get
install postgresql-8.3 pgadmin3 and go to this URL.

> At trade shows
> (LinuxWorld, LinuxTag, LISA, etc.) this is one of the things which
> distinguishes us from the commercial software vendors; they won't give away
> their software, we will.

No it doesn't, if there is a software vendor there, I can get their
software on a nice little CD or DVD. Including our primary competition,
Oracle.

> As for the donations, I don't think we realistically can raise more than about
> $350 per trade show booth from all sources without merchandising becoming the
> main focus of our booth. Debian does that, and I don't think it's something
> we should emulate.
>

We raised more than that at SCALE, and OSCON last year.

> If we're going to add anything to the booth for $$$, I think we should
> consider the plushy elephants. That's a higher-end item, and can inspire
> people to give us $30-$40 for an elephant instead of $20 for a t-shirt, which
> would increase total giving.

A shirt is more useful than a plushy elephant and cost about the same.

>
> I also think we should make a wholesale distribution arrangement with a
> publisher (APress?) for PostgreSQL books. Robert, whom should I talk to at
> APress?

Well we could just use Ingram for that and then avoid dealing with
publishers directly as a whole.

Joshua D. Drake