Free Culture Swarthmore

Every year here at Swarthmore, our local environmentalist group, Earthlust, “storms the dorms.” They basically go to door in the dorms and tell people what they can do to reduce energy usage (as reducing energy usage on campus is their current project). We thought that this would be a great model for Free Culture Swarthmore to emulate. It just so happened that some of our friends in the IT department (specifcially Marc Richards, who rocks) were working (unofficially) on promoting Firefox use on campus. They had installed Firefox on all of the public area Windows computers and Macs, they had made ginormous banners and posted them around campus, and they had created a local Firefox download site complete with FAQs and a help forum (the site is only accessible from on campus, my apologies to visitors). So we decided to help them out, and storm the dorms to help people install Firefox on their computers!

First we made some flyers to hand out to people, telling people what Firefox is, how they can get help using it, and why we care about Firefox. Then we made CDs with the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox on them to help our dorm storming teams. Finally, we divided into teams and covered each dorm, from top to bottom!

Below are the reports from some of our dorm teams. Overall, I think the event was a success!

Parrish storming report

Hello all,

Lisa and I managed to actually perform Firefox installs on 8 machines, and gave the philosophy handout to 2 people (I think) who already had Firefox but didn’t use it much. We also encountered a bunch of already-converted Firefox/Mozilla/Camino users (maybe 15 or 20?) and stuck 70 or so little papers with the firefox.swarthmore.edu URL on all the doors where we got no answer. A handful of people asked us to come back later when they were more awake/less busy studying. This rates as a success in my book. Tomorrow, to Dana!

PPR report

Kit and I just hit Palmer, Pittenger & Roberts. I must admit, we were a bit more shy: We decided not to risk annoying people by knocking on closed doors (so every closed door got a little paper with the URL), and we didn’t even ask people if we could install it then and there (everyone already seemed a bit suspicious, and we figured that would heighten the suspicion).

However, a number of those we spoke to seemed very receptive, and we had several interesting discussions with people about the ideology. It was amusing how people just couldn’t get over the fact that we were freely spending our time convincing them to use Firefox. “Is ITS paying you? Is Mozilla paying them?” Which was, of course, just fodder for more discussion. I’d say in the end, our enthusiasm got through, and made sense to people. As one practical note, we found people much more trusting (as well as curious) when we introduced ourselves with a “Our group is working with ITS to… ” They trust ITS, and the fact that ITS likes it enough to make really big posters (and isn’t being paid to!) carried a lot of weight.
-David

Note: as mentioned above, ITS had not actually officially approved the campaign, it was just something that some ITS employees were doing in their spare time. Of course, we hope to make their support of Firefox official in the future If you try this on your campus, try to get the official support of your IT department.

Hallowell report

Arthur and I did Hallowell tonight…we did on-the-spot installs on 3 machines, and gave out fliers to lots more people. I was surprised by the number of people we talked to who already had Firefox…I would guess the number approached 40%. Overall it went pretty well.

-Andrew L

Dana storming report

Intrepid as ever, Lisa and I took Dana by storm this evening. In a mere 85 minutes, we performed 6 Firefox installs and 1 Thunderbird install (the latter by special request of the recipient). Nearly half of the denizens we encountered were already using Firefox or Safari, and most of the IE folk who weren’t interested in having us do an install that instant readily accepted propaganda. There was, however, one fellow who adamantly insisted that he liked IE and wasn’t interested in switching, and one OS 9 user whom we could only offer pity.

So, we have 14 verified installs. We rock. Can anyone top that?

David

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 5:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.