This year we accomplished another milestone, by we I mean the Tequila Valley Cancun group. We finalize a new FLISOL event. This one with way more support than the previous one. Although there are still a laundry list of things to improve, this definitely was a great effort, and an opportunity to evaluate how well we can play together.
The Free software installfest in Latin America got a great amount of attendance, mainly because this time we implement a press release which helped us gain an exposure we haven’t got before.
This time we had a platform to coordinate the tasks that were needed for the event. A type of canvas digital board called Trello. This gave us the chance to be able to delegate responsibility and improve our continuation.
Another big lift was the sponsorship from a major company that allowed us to not worry about space, and infrastructure (Desk, chairs, tables, etc). Which by the way, were top notch, although it’s a bit odd that in the end we couldn’t really used it as intended and end up handling the same projection presentation.
On the other hand we had a lot of things we really missed specially on promotion:
- Visit universities and high schools, we missed many of them.
- Academic ambassadors, people that help us from these schools.
- Visit companies and provide a good outline of what the event is about for them to get there.
- Promote it on more radio stations, TV shows and newspapers.
We also could have work out better on scientific software as well as games. The demos were something that we could have organize better not to say we missed showing off the VoIP, Media Center (to a degree) and the overall Linux Desktops.
Swag was something that we rushed in the end, but with better support this could have been much better. It was great we got T-shirts but with better swag we would have got USB with free software in it, as well as other things.
In the end what we need to do is also reflected on how this can benefit TQVCancun and I think that invitations were not offered as open as I would have wished for. To invite people to the group and make them members is something that could have helped the survival of the group and that is something we would need to pay more attention to in the future.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 