I've been interested for quite some time to try to get into the Anaheim Trade show. The music industry has little to no strong OpenSource connections. I've been a few times, through a friends connection and have asked around at the different expos about FOSS and got totally blank looks.

Last year they had people from 99 countries, 1,400 media outlets and 95,000 registered attendees were at the show.This presents a great opportunity to reach a new market of people that know nothing about Fedora or the OpenSource community. The whole process is pretty complex, so prepare for a long explanation.

NAMM Membership: NAMM is not open to the public so you have to be a member of NAMM to be able to attend. There are restrictions on who can join NAMM as well. Currently, Fedora does not qualify for membership on it's own. However, RedHat can qualify as a service provider, and "send" Fedora if we can show two contracts/invoices with two different companies in the music industry. Ruth, is working on this, hopefully we'll know more soon.

Membership Dues and Exhibit Space: For Service Providers membership costs $675 (after we are accepted it's $600 if the dues don't increase). It gets us 4 passes to each North America NAMM events (more than one, I'll cover that in a bit). What it doesn't do is get you additional passes or Expo space. The cost of exhibit space is $30.75 per square foot, making it our biggest ticket item for the year if we choose to pursue a booth in the future. However, Summer NAMM in Nashville is significantly cheaper, http://www.namm.org/summer/2015/exhibitors/options where we could get a booth for 17.25 per square foot (100 ft increments) or a 6' x 8' for $950.

The Plan: Membership costs get us 4 tickets to each of the shows in North America. January 22-25, in Anaheim, CA, and the other is July 9-11, in Nashville TN. I don't know if RedHat wants to send anyone, if they do, they also might be willing to split the costs with us. Currently, I'm reaching out to the Fedora Jam people to see if there's any additional interest there, but both myself and Scott Williams (vwbusguy) are planning on attending. I'm willing to pitch in at least $100 to help cover the costs for membership this year. If we use all 8 of our tickets to both shows, that's around $72 a ticket if RedHat doesn't pitch in. My hope for this year is walk around and make connections. I hope to set up meetings and discussions with what Fedora is, why use OpenSource, why OpenSource your software, why bother with Linux in general, and how they can get involved in the community. The event boxes are super glorified rolling cases, so I plan on packing the crap out of it every day, wearing a shirt that says "Ask me about the ultimate free stuff" (freebies/swag are huge thing at NAMM, just like at most shows, but nothing is libre, hence ultimate) and just give away t-shirts and whatnot to every person I take a meeting with or have a good conversation with. To be honest it would probably be wise of me to carry around some RedHat cards if people are interested in getting support for a server that doesn't crash every week. Ultimately it would be great to send people like Fernando and Brandon Jones (who I think are both on the East Coast) to Summer NAMM as well, but I'm sure we have other Ambassadors that could make it to the Nashville show. Going and making contacts will put us in a good position on making a decision if this is even an outlet that we want to pursue next year. I want to talk with smaller booths and try to get an idea of how many stickers and DVDs we're going to need to bring. 95,000 is a lot of people, but how many want your stuff? If we do this, I want to make sure we do it right and that we can actually make a big impact next year if we decide to exhibit. The Anaheim show is their big show and sending some people (Scott, me, and hopefully some RH people) as recon, and to lay the ground work, isn't time wasted.

We are in a unique position to reach out to the music industry, and with the development of digital music and effects a huge impact could be made on the community, and to be honest, we're probably a little late to the game, but not by much. This isn't something that any other groups could do because of the requirements for membership. Ubuntu, and other distros wouldn't be able to get in, nor would projects that are dedicated to opensource music/audio production. I feel strongly like this would be good move, not only for Fedora, but for the larger community as well.

Well, I promised it would be long, and it is. We need to vote on this soon so there's no rush charge for getting into the show.