News and Announcements

July 20, 2005 - June Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

June Newsletter
 
 
 
Welcome to the June edition of the BSD Certification newsletter. The big news this month is the publication of the results of the Task Analysis Survey, but there are also updates as well as some upcoming events. You'll also find the Food for Thought section quite interesting.
 
Report on the Task Analysis Survey Published
MeetBSD Talk
Upcoming Events
Web site Statistics Report and Analysis
Mailing List Statistics
Translated Brochures
Food for Thought
 
 
 
Report on the Task Analysis Survey Published
 
 
The BSD Certification Group is pleased to announce the publication of their detailed Report on the results of the Task Analysis Survey.
 
In order to reduce the size of this comprehensive report, Section 5 of the report contains hyperlinks pointing to separate PDFs of the graphs so readers with limited bandwidth can just download graphs of interest. The report itself is 143 pages and is available as a 2.8 MB PDF. Each hyperlink in Section 5 contains the size of the associated PDF.
 
All are encouraged to read the Report and to discuss their thoughts on the BSDCert mailing list.
 
The full press release regarding the Report is available here. Feel free to release it to any forums where the Report may be of interest.
 
 
MeetBSD Talk
 
 
Dru Lavigne of the BSD Certification Group gave a talk on BSD Certification at MeetBSD on June 17 in Krakow, Poland. About 75 members of the Polish BSD community attended the talk and there was much interest and feedback from the community. Dru had a chance to speak with most of the attendees and much of the discussions focused on these points:
 
  ·
whether or not the certification should be available in both English and Polish  
 
  ·
how to keep the certification affordable for both the exam itself and any training materials  
 
  ·
how the Polish community could assist in providing training and testing centers 
 
The slides for the talk itself are available in OpenOffice Impress (.sxi) format here; they have also been condensed into PDF format here. For those interested in seeing a video of all of the talks, the video is available with a minimum donation of $25 USD to your favorite BSD project. See http://2005.meetbsd.org/video.html for details. Note that most of the talks are in Polish; Dru's talk on BSD Certification and Scott Long's talks are the only ones available in English.
Dru Lavigne was also interviewed by Aleksander Fafula of http://www.bsdguru.org while in Poland. The interview is available in both Polish and English. The following picture shows Aleksander on the left and Dru on the right:
 
 
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Upcoming Events
 
BSD Day, Sao Paulo, Brazil
 
On August 13th, Jean M Melo and Patrick Tracanelli of the BSD Certification Group will be handing out BSD Brochures on BSD Day, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They will also promote a discussion regarding BSD Certification with the Brazilian community in the "open discussion table", that will happen at this event. A FreeBSD Brasil LTDA employee, Renato Frederick, will be taking notes on the community's main concerns, requests and suggestions. Look for a report about this in next month's newsletter.
 
BSD Booth at OSCON, Portland, Oregon
 
There will be a *BSD booth at this year's OSCON. Dru Lavigne and Jeremy Reed of the BSD Certification Group will be handing out flyers and answering questions regarding BSD Certification.
 
Matt Olander of techTV fame will be handing out FreeBSD advocacy materials and Kris Moore of PC-BSD will be handing out PC-BSD CDs. There will also be volunteers representing the NetBSD and OpenBSD projects. If you're in the Portland, Oregon area August 3 and 4 and wish to help man the booth, please send an email to the discussion mailing list. If you're planning on attending OSCON or will be in the Portland, Oregon area, don't forget to drop by the BSD booth. It is in the Exhibition Hall which is free of charge.
 
 
Web site Statistics Report and Analysis
 
In June we had 3298 different visitors, counting 30193 web page hits. with an average of 110 visitors a day, and about 8 Mbytes of HTTP requests on a daily basis.
 
On June 15 we reached our month's top accesses with 174 visitors. We have our main access period between 10:00 and 18:00. This 8-hour period is responsible for ~ 70% of all visits, which is the "commercial" period of time, so people visit us mostly when they are at work.
 
In June, the "Survey" sites were still the most visited internal pages, but they were no longer in first place. The main website (root) is the most requested URL. The top 10 internal pages are:
 
 
 
 
 
 
# Hits Bytes
1 1977 6.55% 10865 4.93% /
2 920 3.05% 48800 22.14% /phpESP/public/survey.php
3 692 2.29% 1761 0.80% /cert.htm
4 439 1.45% 1173 0.53% /resources.htm
5 396 1.31% 4913 2.23% /news.htm
6 360 1.19% 1197 0.54% /goals.htm
7 355 1.18% 4330 1.96% /about.htm
8 352 1.17% 2408 1.09% /faq.htm
9 323 1.07% 1288 0.58% /contrib.htm
10 305 1.01% 839 0.38% /sponsors.htm
 
So, people are interested in general information about the certification itself, and later look for something to read. After that they go to the news subsection.
 
According to referals analysis most visitors:
 
1- Get into the main web site
2- Look for specific information regarding the certifications themselves.
3- Look for something to read, starting from resources (and do not find many things).
4- Look for things to read somewhere else, which are usually:
  4.1
news 
  4.2
goals 
  4.3
faq 
5- Later, most visitors leave the website.
 
The ones who do not leave, keep reading everything else, without a common order.
 
Here are the top 10 countries for the past month:
 
1 6000 19.87% Unresolved/Unknown
2 5802 19.22% Network
3 4918 16.29% US
4 2890 9.57% Brazil
5 2078 6.88% Poland
6 1320 4.37% Germany
7 999 3.31% France
8 875 2.90% Canada
9 628 2.08% Italy
10 343 1.14% Australia
 
 
 
Mailing List Statistics
 
Here are the number of subscribers to the mailing lists as of July 18, 2005:
 
Discuss: 746 subscribers
 
Announce 67 subscribers
 
 
 
 
 
 
Translated Brochures
 
The Translation Teams have started the translation for BSD Certification Brochures. At the current moment there are finished brochures for the following languages:
 
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Mexican Spanish
- Simplified Chinese
- German
- French
- Russian
- Dutch (available soon)
 
The PDFs for each translation are available at the Resources section of the BSD Certification website.
 
Food for Thought
 
Luiz Gustavo of the BSD Certification Group recently spoke with Evan Leibovitch of the Linux Professional institute (LPI). Evan raised some interesting points regarding certification which provide much food for thought:
 
"There are many people who are against certification in principle, so much that they actively fight its development. These people should be noted for their numbers, but you will not find their rationale useful. The attempt to accommodate this POV (point of view) is why Usenix took more than 10 years to create a certification program -- had it moved sooner perhaps it would not have failed."
 
"It is vital to recognize that certification is not a complete solution to anything. It is a part of an education process and a part of a hiring process. And it is at best only a small part of efforts to take BSD "mainstream". It is a less effective tool in the hiring of people with very deep or specialized skills. It is not for everyone. A big problem occurs when marketing efforts attempt to make certification perceived as more useful or important than it is."
 
"One of the critical things we did in the early days of LPI was to ensure that senior and influential people would not actively oppose development of certification, as had happened within Usenix in the early 90s. The response LPI received from people such as Linux Torvalds was close to "while I would never need certification for myself, I can see its value to others in our community -- I may not help but I will not oppose it either". This response is the best that may be expected in some cases and is totally reasonable."
 
We're interested in hearing what you think about this month's "food for thought". Remember, you can always stay involved in the following ways:
 
  ·
Post an email to the discuss mailing list. 
  ·
Join in on the #bsdcert channel at irc.freenode.net 
  ·
Send your thoughts directly to the Group using our contact form. 
 




























































































































































































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