S-Block, Waikato University, Saturday 20th. It'll be great to have you there.

Hey folks. Just thought I'd drop a line to the list as a way of introducing myself and to acknowlege the effort the group obviously put into SFD last weekend. I'm a web developer type who's been working with open-source tech for many years now, some of the Uni folk on the list will know me, I saw a few familiar faces in S-block on Saturday. I was really impressed with what you'd put together. I took a couple of friends along who are also techies, none of us are hard-core Linux desktop users (yet) but two of us have been using *nix back-ends for some time now. Was great to be met on the door (sorry didnt catch the guy's name, my mate Matt used to work with him at Telecom), getting a warm reception at an event like that is so important, especially so I imagine for those who may not be as familiar with all the lingo etc and feeling a bit intimidated by all the Alpha-Geeks. Awesome to see the number of folk there who weren't afraid to be asking questions and finding out about stuff that they could see themselves personally using. Its easy to give people too much info, but from what I saw the speakers and folks at the demos in the reception area had the balance right, not too much, not too condescending. One thing that did strike me was the fact that a lot of the attendees were pretty much already FOSS converts, not too many total noobies, I guess it's tough raising awareness of an event and topic like this, but I wonder if maybe being on the edge of town (ie at the Uni) might not be too far away for some people, would it be better in a central location where casual bypassers could be tempted to pop in and find out whats goin on? All in all, it was very well done, I look FWD to popping along to the next one :-) Dean Stringer