[TriLUG] Speaking of Lulu Tech circus (article found)

[Benjamin Reed]

On Sunday, September 29, 2002, at 10:48 PM, Mike Johnson wrote:

> Young said he was a bit disappointed that most of the dozen or so user
> groups that had booths did the typical trade-show user-group thing: sit
> behind a table and let the attendees come to them.
>
> What the fsck where we supposed to do?  We had -no- idea what this 
> thing
> was about.  To us, it -was- a typical trade-show.  Why wouldn't we to
> the typical thing?  Did we have the slightest clue what to expect?  No.
> Did we have any idea what sorts of attendees to expect?  No.  We had to
> beg for internet access.  We did not have enough booth space to do
> anything -other- than 'the typical trade-show user-group thing', except
> we managed to pull off two booths.  There were no 'exhibitor' badges 
> for
> us, just the little wrist band, so we probably didn't much look like
> 'exhibitors'.

Yeah, I'll second that.  As a speaker, I really had no idea what was 
going on other than that I was supposed to show up at 6:00, and that 
there was a courtesy room somewhere.  The only other thing I got was a 
powerpoint presentation (don't have Office, so I could only kind of 
read it).

The powerpoint presentation was mostly market-speak and then a set of 
instructions as to how to put together my proposal (this was before I 
was confirmed).  There was very little info as far as "OK, your talk 
was accepted, now here's what you can do."  They had step 1, but were 
missing steps 2 through 4.  =)

It turns out I didn't need much of that, so I'm not *terribly* 
disappointed, but this was obviously a 1.0 show.  When I was asked to 
speak, my mental image of what the show would be was an O'Reilly 
conference, but with some booths with interactive stuff.  They did 
nothing that would have made me think any different.  Now that I've 
been to the show, I have a better idea of what they were trying to pull 
off, but they really didn't do anything as far as setting up 
expectations other than calling it a "circus".

Regardless of the setup, I had a lot of fun hanging out with the TriLUG 
guys at the booth, and we honestly did get a lot of face-time with 
people who didn't know about TriLUG and wanted to know more.  I truly 
think that at least for us, it was successful, and if Bob Young wanted 
us to do things differently, he should have said something, rather than 
retroactively berating the exhibitors in a sound bite.