Our SFD is over since about 7 hours. We had around 30 visitors. I am VERY pleased with the result. Last year there were 20 visitors altogether, this year we had 30 nearly the whole day. There was a lot of curiosity about what free software was. Many of the scepticism that some had could be resolved.
Our planning and the location was much better than last year. This year we could use the rooms at the Gewerbe- und Technikzentrum (GTZ) Raisdorf, which is a location where startup companies are located.
We did focus mostly on Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org this year, because I thought that this will allow us to do more – and from the reaction of the people I think this was absolutely the right way to go. For every small team in the future I would also suggest to follow the ‘less is more’ principle. Less topics, less talks, higher quality and maybe even more time to talk to visitors.
They are all very happy if you answer their questions they PERSONALLY have in a private conversation. I tend to think more and more that the great talks are not that important and its unlikely that this will make your visitors satisfied.
It’s also because you need to know what troubles people have. If you talk you can not listen at the same time. I do regret a bit, that I didnt keep my original wish to use 2 hours between each talk including breaks. I think talks should normally not be longer than 45 minutes essentially with additional time to ask questions. But I am very much against to try to lock visitors in a strict 45 minutes corset or with too much fixed breaks. You definitely need to be flexible.
We also had two spontaneous talks after the official end of the talks by a younger visitor about Blender and some programming topic.
Although we had a 9 hour program people still looked hungry as they left. But not from no food – we had a lunchtime with real food, nothing vegetarian was available, thought.
As I woke up this morning I thought: Why do I do this, as its all volunteer work – but in the end I was happy to have organized it. I hope it also went well for you all over the world!?

Images from Event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tpfennig/tags/sfd09/

