Thank you for Ubuntu's success at Anime Boston 2010!

It's hard to believe how well this has all come together. If there's one thing we would like to say coming from this, it's that Ubuntu and other free culture and free software (aka open source) groups need to participate in similar events to reach out to non-techie folks. Any convention more tech-focused than this shouldn't need our presence. Let's go over what we accomplished: live installs, dancing games, free kopibon, and more!

We successfully made Ubuntu highly-visible to thousands of convention goers. We kept hearing from people that our booth was very eye-catching and really stood out! We can thank the Ubuntu MA team leader, Martin (DoctorMO), for the awesome banner and posters we had up. On display, we had four machines by System76: a Starling Netbook, Pangolin Performance, Bonobo Performance, and a 32" HDTV hooked up to another Pangolin Performance under the table. Using the big screen, we lured in the crowed. Blasting techno and showing off crazy compiz-fusion effects, we caught the attention of passersby who were very impressed. It wasn't hard to hear outbursts such as, "Who needs Windows 7!?" and other comments on how awesome the Ubuntu desktop looked. The response we generated was incredible-- people were genuinely amazed! 


Over and over, people approached us with great reactions. Lots of them were already using Ubuntu, some knew someone who loved Ubuntu, many had heard of Ubuntu, and just as many were curious to find out what it was! The reactions we received were a testament not only to how far Ubuntu has spread already but also how extremely receptive still-unaware individuals are. 

FireFox posing in front of our booth!

Costumed characters stopped by to cheer us on including Zero who rushed past, snatched a CD, and shouted "Zero uses Ubuntu!" which we were very glad to hear, seeing as he ends up uniting the entire world! There were also plenty of common citizens drifting through the vast sea of cosplayers, unadorned in any costume aside from their own personal style, who excitedly approached us. People were openly expressing their appreciation to others with exclamations they made on their way from our booth like, "Sweet, I just got a new operating system!" Some were asking how they could get more involved with advocacy and our group and we even picked up another booth helper! This is what we love about the community.

Many still were the people who came on behalf of someone they knew who loved Ubuntu, grabbing materials and goodies to give them later. Most important to us, though, was everyone who had never heard of Ubuntu but grew excited to learn more upon seeing our display. People took around 500 double-sided flyers about Ubuntu, Free Software (aka Open Source), and the many powerful design tools available: Blender, Inkscape, Synfig, GIMP, and MyPaint. An additional 550 live CD's and 1000 copies of the Ubunchu manga were taken (extra comic books available at request). We even did 5 live-installs, right there at our booth! That number would be higher but people just didn't have their machines with them. Our booth visitors came with curiosity and left eager to pop in their new LiveCDs.

We did live demonstrations of apps like Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender (well, we showed off some files from Sintel, the foundation's latest Open Project). We played videos like production cuts from the Morevna Project sent to us for the event along with The Matrix Runs on Windows, and open projects, Elephant's Dream and Big Buck Bunny. We played games like Savage2 and StepMania 4.0, breaking out the dance pad which drew in a good crowd of dancers and spectators very quickly.

That's not all. Our presence wasn't limited to the Dealer's Room. We also had our flyers and manga on the freebie table and, just like last year, they seemed to be the only thing people were really interested in! If we could've kept up with how fast they were being taken, we could've distributed a lot more. On top of all of this, Martin went up to the Artist's Alley armed with our flyers and talked to everyone up there about all the tools available for their needs. The artists there were very receptive and it definitely helped that we made the effort to reach out to them personally.

This being our first event of this size, we did learn a few good lessons as well, and have some new ideas for the future. You didn't think we were done, did you? Overall, we don't feel there was anything missing, but we've learned a lot about what this kind of project involves and can do even better! Next time we will organize more ahead of time knowing which things require more or less time and be better prepared to handle it all more efficiently. We'll assemble a team earlier on, and give time to go over the good and bad talking points for different kinds of people. It isn't that our booth people weren't amazing; it's that we can always work on perfecting the art of hooking in as many people as we can, as quickly and effectively as we can. One thing which could've been handled better by myself was documentation of the event in pictures and video. There was no way for me to be behind the camera when the booth was at its busiest because I needed to keep the demos going. As a result, all of the pictures in our album are from the quietest times at our booth. I did leave the camera rolling during some periods, so hopefully I'll be able to churn out a decent video with that footage, but next time we will dedicate a lot of time to filming and photographing.

Hopefully this have given you a decent picture of how well everything went. We were even invited to some other conventions! If you have any ideas, want to get involved with the team, or just have questions, please get in touch. This all started out as a little idea, and thanks to the help of many, it grew into the super-successful Ubuntu @ Anime Boston project! 

Thank you to everyone who helped:

YOU!

Our biggest thanks goes to all of you, the entire community, for all the generous support you've given us with banner hosting, donations, and all the other help we've gotten. None of this would have happened without all your support! 

The beautiful high-quality laptops and netbook lent to us by System76 were an essential part of this event and their help with promotion was invaluable. 

One thousand flyers courtesy of ProdPromo was one of our most valuable resources at the convention. 

Three thousand copies of the Ubunchu Manga in gorgeous quality by Red Sun Press, a truly environmentally friendly worker-owned union shop dedicated to social justice.

Fiscal sponsorship and guidance from Linux Fund helped keep this project going. 

LiveCDs, flyers, and other Ubuntu goodies like hats, t-shirts, silly putty, mouse pads, pens, and books from Canonical made our booth complete.

ASCII Media Works provided us with copies of the Ubuntu Magazine Japan which includes the Ubunchu Manga.

A huge thank you to Arturo "C-quel" Silva of Pigux for being our biggest donor and providing incredible artwork used throughout our booth. 

The Morevna Project covered us in a blog post and provided us a video of production cuts. Synfig, the main tool behind the project hosted a prominent banner on their website.

Banners hosted by PlayDeb and GetDeb, the popular third-party Ubuntu repos, have helped raise awareness of our fundraiser.

Final push for Ubuntu @ Anime Boston

Thanks to all of you who've made tax-deductible donations so far. We're so close! We still need help to reach and, better yet, push past our fundraising goal. This is the most important time for this project as our deadline is almost upon us. We have a lot we're excited to announce once we finish fundraising, so stay tuned and thank you so much for your generous contributions.

We have a first draft of one side of our tri-fold flyer by Martin Owens and we'd love to hear what you think of it! We want to do the best we can to showcase Ubuntu and promote free culture, software, and content, to people who might not understand the benefits of being able to edit code when they're not coders.

Lastly, we're in need of a couple more volunteers who would like to help us out at the booth. If you're interested, please get in touch.

The Morevna Project: Free and Open Source Anime

Regardless of your feelings towards anime, any free culture advocate should appreciate this effort. The Morevna Project is working towards the creation of a full-length anime film using only free and open source software to be released as free content. Similar to the Blender Foundation's Open Movie (and Game) Projects, the Morevna Project aims to promote FOSS tools and ideals, test and improve the FOSS tools used for production, validate the use of FOSS tools for professional use, and finally, to provide free content for others to share, use, and build upon. They will be using various tools to produce their futuristic adaptation of the Russian fairy tale “Marya Morevna”. 2D animation is being done with Synfig, who we'd like to thank for supporting us with a banner, along with Pencil. 3D modeling and animation is of course being done with Blender. Finally, GIMP and Krita are being used for static bitmap images and Inkscape for vectors. We will absolutely be promoting the Morevna Project and as many of these tools as possible when we showcase Ubuntu @ Anime Boston.

The anime community is the most far-reaching group sitting in such a perfect position to embrace the free culture philosophy. They are more ready than most and this could help revive their hurting industry as well as validate the viability of free content for creators around the world.

A  CLI-tan by chrislnew

Already, the japanese anime and manga community is highly participatory with the creation of anime music videos (AMV), fansubs, and dōjinshi (self-published fan works), so they should be extremely receptive to the concepts behind the free Culture movement. Getting them to try FOSS tools should also be less difficult because the anime fandom tends to be geekier and more open minded. This group, so incredibly passionate and tight-knit that they have huge conventions around the world and are known for cosplay (dressing in costume), can really help free culture ideals spread virally through their global community. I can think of only two things that might require stressing: dispelling the myth that copyright restrictions are about due credit when in fact plagiarism is plagiarism regardless of copyright, and most copyleft licenses still require attributing credit; and that non-commercial (NC) is non-free.

In addition, we could be a big help to the anime industry. Although generally permissive of derivative fan works, they retain copyright which makes the legality of such works questionable. On top of this, the industry is hurting from their reliance on traditional media distribution and reluctance to embrace new technologies. We should be demonstrating the potential behind embracing their participatory culture and using the internet as a distribution platform in combination with funding models like that of Blender's Open Projects or the threshold pledge system and/or using micropayment services like Flattr. Accomplishing this could both help revive the anime industry as well as the validate publishing free content as beneficial for creators and sustainable for business.