Aveiro Showdown 2010

Aveiro Showndown 2010

Background

In February 2001 the city of Aveiro received a small event to promote GNU/Linux organized by me and two other persons, Mário Moreira (PLUG / Portugal Telecom) and Bruno Ferreira (University of Aveiro / GLUA).
This event was sponsored by several parties, amongst them Red Hat (donated merchandise through PLUG), SuSE GmbH (donated merchandise), Sun MicroSystems (donated 2 boxes of Star Office 5.1) and some local IT Industry enablers.
This event was in parallel with Aveiro Digital Project in the Aveiro Cultural Congress Center during a weekend and gathered the majority of the Portuguese Linux Community associated with PLUG (Portuguese Linux Users Group, now extinct). Over 400 people attended this event (estimated on the basis of the merchandise distributed).
This event was organized in order to promote GNU/Linux through a Linux Install Party supported by PLUG Community Members. People from all over Portugal have attended this event.

I would like to leave a special thanks to the following persons who made this possible:
* Eng.º Mário Moreira (PLUG, Portugal Telecom)
* Eng.º Ricardo Cerqueira (PLUG, Novis ISP)
* Dr. Sara Oliveira (CLIX ISP)
* Bruno Ferreira (University of Aveiro)
* Rúben Mendes (PLUG, ANSOL)
* Red Hat
* Sun MicroSystems
* SuSE GmbH
* Inforlandia LDA.

Aveiro Showdown 2010

Following the general idea of the original event in 2001, I'm currently planning to organize another GNU/Linux promotion event, but this time I'm targeting a different audience and I have different goals.
This is just sketch for the event I'm planning to organize and nothing on this Document is stone set.

Target Audience

This event is meant to target the following audience:
* Local IT Professionals (estimated in over 1500)
* Local IT Higer Education Students (several hundreds)
* National GNU/Linux Enthusiasts

Goals

The following goals are to be achieved:
* Promote GNU/Linux with the local IT Industry, considering that Aveiro is the most important technological pole in Portugal (mainly due to PT Inovação S.A., former CET, Center for Telecommunication Studies), from which great accolades have been achieved: i.e. First Mobile Pre-Paid SIM card.
* Promote the usage of FOSS with the local IT Industry.
* Promote Fedora Linux as a productivity tool for Small/Medium Business (considering that 240.000 Portuguese companies are Small/Medium Business)
* Promote Fedora Project with our visitors. This goal should be verified by the possibility of finding new contributors willing to join Fedora Project.
* Provide local interaction with community and their Idols.

Means

* This Event will occur as a two day event during the weekend.
* The event will be splited in two; during the morning the traditional Linux Install Party supported by GLUA community members; during the afternoon a set of conferences in Portuguese and English to be performed by invited guests connected to FOSS, either IT FOSS enablers and Contributors from FOSS Projects.
* Dates aren't set, this will be worked out after the main contacts have been established.

Possible Supporters

* GLUA (Aveiro University Linux Users Group) - Contacted and Confirmed
* ANSOL (National Association for Free Software) - To be contacted
* PT Inovação S.A. (Corporate GNU/Linux enabler) - To be contacted
* IPAM (Portuguese Institute for Marketing Management) - To be contacted
* Fedora Project - Contacts in Progress
* Red Hat - Explore this possibility since this event is targeting all the local industry.

References

GLUA - http://glua.ua.pt ANSOL - http://www.ansol.org PT Inovação - http://www.ptinovacao.pt IPAM - http://www.ipam.pt Fedora Project - http://www.fedoraproject.org Red Hat - http://www.redhat.org