At the suggestion of chrisb, I'm starting a thread here to focus on the topic of presenting FreeCAD at conferences or other public / private venues.
This is an issue I'm working with as I'm going to present open source / FreeCAD to industry engineers across the state here in Illinois (US) in early June. In addition, I've been contemplating a presentation at Ohio LinuxFest this fall, and the call for speakers opens, I think sometime in April.
That said, there are a couple other threads to note:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23412
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=27063
The big issue for me is my audience. In my June presentation, I'm talking to engineers and business owners. I'm not terribly worried about tailoring my content for that, but they are, as a general rule, going to be unfamiliar with open source, or may not give it much credibility.
By contrast, should I be accepted to present at Ohio LinuxFest, credibility and basic FOSS principles are not the issue. Rather, the audience will likely not have expertise in the more traditional engineering disciplines (to which FreeCAD caters) and would probably be more interested in the non-engineering elements of our project.
So I'd like to explore the various aspects of FreeCAD and how it can be presented in different ways, rather than just a brute-force presentation of it's features. What sorts of topics and strategies to present FreeCAD makes it easier for various groups (like non-engineers or non_FOSS folks) to understand?
To this point, I've considered mentioning topics more common to FOSS projects in general for the LinuxFest propossal.
For example:
1. The conversion process from Python2 to Python3 and /or QT4 to QT5
2. UI / UX growing pains - successes / failures (@ickby's new UI)
3. Community... We seem to be pretty healthy, but how are we, really?
4. Attention from external interests (@yorick mentioned Ton Roosendaal has an eye on us, small businesses are using FreeCAD...)
5. Criticisms / praises from the engineering industry as a whole...
Again, I don't mean to focus on tangential issues to the exclusion of demonstrating FreeCAD's abilities, but it seems as though they could be developed to make a presentation more interesting to users who don't have a vested interest in FreeCAD's technical strengths.