DFD in Vienna: A review.
gk
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Thursday 27 March 2008
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Our Fellowship group from Vienna placed a booth in front of the Museumsquartier (on the corner of Mariahilferstrasse and Museumsplatz). We were there from 10:00 until 18:15 and raised awareness for the relevance of Free Document Standards among the many interested people who passed by. So we did wait until somebody came to us in the most cases, since there are so many organisations that ask to sign some petition or want you to donate something. This is why people tend to be rude and not receptive if you just start talking to them on the streets.
However, we were astonished to see how many people were interested in what we were doing. We were also surprised to reach so many different kinds of people with our message. There were people of all ages and all professions (we even met a soldier and a nun), so we can approve that open standards for electronic documents are important for everyone.
There also were many tourists from all over the world, who primarily wanted to ask the way. However, though they were on holidays, we were able to brief them about ODF too.
The first thing we did after telling the people that it is Document Freedom Day was to ask if they use a computer to write text, work with spreadsheets or presentations. Only two or three people did respond that they do not have a PC. The others, except for less than three people, did all use proprietary software and file formats. They were surprised to hear that this is not good for them. After some discussion most people were thankful for the new facts and took a flyer with them.
Apart from the great material we found in the starter pack we organised some flyers in german and some CDs with free software for reading/writing ODF for those without broadband connections.
Check out the Photos!
Along with the booth we also organised an online activity. Unfortunately, we all get an e-mail with an attachement in a proprietary format once in a while. On DFD we did strike back! We sent e-mails to all our contacts that besides an explanatory body also contained an attachement (german) in ODF format.
