News and Announcements

May 15, 2005 - April Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

April Newsletter

It has been a busy month for BSD Certification. In this edition of the newsletter, you can see how the Task Analysis Survey is progressing, find out about recent events where BSD Certification was discussed, and catch up on the latest threads on the BSD Certification discussion mailing list.

The Survey

The English version of the Task Analysis Survey was launched on April 21 and you still have some time left to participate. The survey is available in several languages including English, Dutch, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese. You can find the links for each survey at this chart.

As of May 10, over 500 persons have completed the survey and have provided lots of excellent feedback and comments. Your comments will definitely help the BSD Certification Group determine what is important and assist in the creation of the certification roadmap.

Several people have asked the origin of the experience levels used in the survey. Yes, they were modeled after the SAGE experience levels.

Jim Brown provided an interesing overview of some preliminary results at the half way mark of the survey.

For a little trivia: We have surveys submitted from Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Cost Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States.

Web Stats

Since the Survey has been online, the average website hits have increased by 130%. It's interesting to note that these have been the top 5 referrers:

For the first 8 days of May we had 2275 total vists and 24112 total hits.

Brochure Stats

A brochure describing the goals of BSD certification is here. So far it has been downloaded 245 times since it was made available.

David Rhodus of the DragonFly BSD project handed out 50 copies at Usenix and he had this to say:

"There was a lot of general interest from everyone, from my perception, mostly from the sysadmin area. One question in my notes is if people will need CEU(Continuing Education Unit) credits to keep the certification. I told them that at this point we weren't looking at using the CEU method. Most people said they would checkout the site and look for more information on how to get the certification we it come available".

Mailing List Summary

There are currently 701 persons currently subscribed to the BSDCert mailing list. As usual, there were several interesting discussions since the last edition of the newsletter.

One of our list members asked whether the certification would be taken seriously by employers.

Someone else asked about the cost of the exam. which was answered by Jim Brown of the BSD Certification Group.

There was also a reminder of the Announcement mailing list for those who prefer to keep up with BSD Certification progress with little volume.

The logistics of a peer certification was also discussed.

The reasons for and the difficulties in providing translations were discussed.

Some HTML bugs in the survey were dealt with.

BSD Certification in the News

BSD Certification was the topic for a recent blog by Zdnet's Joe Brockmeier.

It was also mentioned briefly at LockerGnome.

BSDCert BoF at BSDCan 2005

There was a BoF (Birds of a Feather) meeting on Friday, May 13th at BSDCan . We'll write more about the discussion in the next edition of the newsletter.



























































































































































































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