It's been a tempestual two weeks for me.  Just a taste of what I'm facing  
personally:  Depending on how I count, about three or five times in my  
life I have succeeded at being not only being the best that I can be at  
something, but better than a greater majority of people at that thing,  
then getting punished very severely for it.  On the horizon this month an  
opportunity awaits which may actually reward me for doing excellent work,  
which of course I'm trying to acquire.  So sorry if I'm running a bit  
behind on installfest stuff.

A number of people on this list have spoken in-person or by e-mail  
off-list about improvements to the installfest.  First, I've called  
Charles about the wired network.  He's going to set up a public jack and  
leave a hub in the usual classroom for us to use.  So we'll actually have  
network this time.

Dennis remarked about the ASU installfest which I also attended, and  
problems they had.  There seems to be a severe miscommunication to the  
public about what installfests are about.  Some come in at 4pm with no  
CD's expecting a repartition, backup, and dual boot to be completed.   
Others wanted some extremely crazy setups which taxed the best of us.  We  
need to communicate the purpose of the installfest better.  We're going to  
have a web page with the Installfest HOWTO in it.  Question is what.

At first I thought we'd say, yes, you can come in for install help, but  
the helpee is the one with their hands on the mouse.  We would also have a  
Toastmasters format, where we'd have tasks instead of speeches,  
functionaries, and toolkits which volunteers would bring.  Hans disagreed,  
saying the purpose of the installfest was in fact to give the public  
installs without their involvement for free, so they can take a working  
Linux box home with them and play.  After some more bantering, all of us  
agreed to exactly this vision.  Volunteers in fact give free installs to  
people.  They must have a working Linux system of some kind by the time  
they leave (which right now isn't happening often enough).  To reduce the  
burden on the volunteers, we need to limit the scope of the work we're  
willing to do.  We also have to prepare people with information on what to  
expect coming to the installfest.

Here's how I believe everyone thinks that people coming to the  
installfests should know:  Before coming to the installfest, you need a  
working computer, complete with PSU, CPU, memory, hard drive (or key fob  
for DSL), CD ROM drive, network card, your own extra hard drive if you  
want backups.  We will install only:  The latest Fedora Core, the latest  
Mandrake, Debian testing, Mepis, DSL, Free BSD, or Slackware.  We will  
either install on a virgin hard drive, or a dual boot of your Windows or  
osX.  Then we need the times for installing their choices of stuff, so  
they know how early they need to come in.  For instance, 1 hour for a  
backup to another disk, 2 hours for a partition resize, 30 minutes for  
FC2, 3 hours for Debian, etc.  We should also have selections for the  
general packages they want installed, like OOO, Samba with printing,  
Apache, PHP, MySQL, C++, GTK dev, Java, etc.

That's the gist of it.  The same information will be formatted in a  
complete and friendly manner.  The information page would be the quickest  
to get online.  There was also talk of an appointment form, which I think  
is a great idea.  Same stuff stated above, but with check boxes,  
submission which e-mails us and gives them specific instructions on when  
to arrive.

The purpose of this is to make is scalable, so the same system can cover  
both small Installfests and large Install Conferences like at ASU.  It  
would also be nice to get Installfests broadcast to big company internal  
networks, so just like Toastmaster's, everyone at Intel, Motorola,  
Honeywell will always know when installfests are held.  You can't  
broadcast stuff like this without a reliable system, and I'm hoping to  
turn this into such a system.

-- 

--Alexander
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