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Apr 15, 2006 - April Newsletter

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BSD Certification Group Newsletter
April 2006

Contents

1 BSD Certification at Cebit

Daniel Seuffert of the DesktopBSD project had this to say about the response to BSD Certification at this year's Cebit:

"BSD Certification was a great sucess, we had 150 flyers and had to reprint 50 more in English during the show."

Wilhem Buehler of AllBSD was also at the BSD booth at Cebit:

"BSDCG was promoted at the BSD-booth at the CeBIT 2006. The actual flyers in German and English were distributed to users and companies. Two companies are now thinking about offering BSD-trainings, when the certification is available. Right now both are doing Windows and Linux. The most frequently asked question was 'when do you start?'"

2 BSD Certification at the Chemnitz Linuxdays

Hubert Feyrer of the BSDCG manned the NetBSD booth at Chemnitz and his full report is available at http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2006/03/06/0000.html. Regarding BSD Certification, he wrote:

"As we also had some BSD Certification flyers, a few people asked about the status of that effort, that I tried to answer. In the context of BSD certification, I also had a very interesting discussion with the German LPI folks about how to perform the actual test. I was told that they either offer traditional and cheap (50EUR) pen and paper exams e.g. at computer events, but that they also had PearsonVUE (www.pearsonvue.com) as partners for doing the certifications worldwide in a professional way, of course not so cheap (about 125EUR). The work-flow they have is to define learning goals, task lists and example questions, do psychometric analysis and then translate the resulting exam questions those for various countries. Providers of LPI educational material is certified by an independent institute that's not attached to LPI to maintain independence. Future goals of LPI are offering more certifications (mysql, Ubuntu, ...) as well as offering associate programs so that training institutes, schools and universities get training material cheaply and are also allowed to do certification tests. I guess we'll see how much of this will be available for (Net)BSD one day, too!"

3 BSD Certification an UKUUG Spring Conference

Dru Lavigne of the BSDCG gave a talk on BSD Certification at the UKUUG Spring Conference. The talk was well attended and the audience had several questions regarding psychometrics and the upcoming BSDA exam. This was the first time that many of the audience had heard of the Certification effort and several expressed interest in getting BSD curriculum into their university or to be considered as a testing center.

4 BSD Certification at BSDCan

Several members of the BSD Certification Group will be attending BSDCan
(http://www.bsdcan.org/2006/) in Ottawa on May 12-13. There will be a BoF (``birds of feather'') at 5:30 on May 12 where those in attendance can meet some members of the BSDCG and have their questions answered regarding certification. Dru Lavigne will also give a talk on BSD Certification on May 12 at 2:30.

5 BSD Certification at Linuxworld Boston

Dru Lavigne was one of several volunteers manning the BSD booth at Linuxworld Boston. She was available to answer questions regarding BSD and the upcoming BSD certification. She also had an opportunity to meet most of the LPI board of directors and discuss open source IT certifications. Her writeup on the booth, including the link to pictures, can be found at http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/unix/bsd.

6 Mailing Lists

The BSD Certification Group mailing list currently has 769 subscribers. And the announcements list has 144 subscribers.

If you are not on the announcements list, please sign up at
http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert-announce/. It is a closed list for announcements regarding The BSD Certification Group.

The general discussion list is at http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert/.

7 Website Statistics

If you define a web hit as a successfully served request, The BSD Certification Group website has passed the half million hits mark since going live, averaging over 2,000 hits per day. This activity transfered over 12 gigabytes of data, averaging around 50 megabytes per day. So, thanks again to the web maintainers and the generously donated hosting.

While two thirds of the hits appear to come from US domestic domains, it is encouraging that the number of recognized international domains exceeds 125 different countries. According to Whois Source, there are only 231 country specific domains. So, our message has not reached the whole world yet. Brazil, Canada, Poland, and Germany dominate our international requests; in that order. One cautionary footnote to visitor IP resolution needs to be made. The increased popularity of anonymous internet communication systems, like Tor, could skew results.

While most visitors come to the site directly, the most frequent referrals come from word-of-mouth within the community. They are: blog.china-pub.com, followed by taosecurity.blogspot.com, www.freebsdchina.org, and a little surprisingly; bsd.slashdot.org. Noteworthy; osnews.com and newsforge.com are up in the ranks too, showing that interviews and news stories in the mainstream help push web traffic.

From the "no surprise here" department:

  • the words "bsd certification" are used in search engines to find the site
  • Friday afternoon seems to be popular time to check out the site

From the "somewhat surprised here" department:

  • Windows is the overwhelming choice for browsing, despite this being a BSD-specific site
  • Browsing in the unix world, Linux and FreeBSD split nearly down the middle, with only a trickle from NetBSD and OpenBSD
  • We got hits from IRIX, HP-UX, OSF1, BeOS, Amiga, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, Atari, and OpenVMS
  • Firefox easily beat out IE (fetch was mostly an administrative script that is no longer used)
  • Alternate browsers (Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, and Galeon) are used much less than expected

Navigational hits within the site focused on the menu choice Certification. This is significant, the demand is there. People want to know more about actual certification. This trend is expected to continue as that page progresses. News, Meet Us, and the FAQ get alot of attention too as people want to stay informed on what is going on and who is behind it all. Regretfully, the Donate page is not a popular choice. Nor is the Contribute page, which explains how to help the effort.

Most downloaded documents:
16,918BSD Certification Roadmap
3,743Exam Objectives
3,217Task Analysis Survey Report
2,236Usage Survey Report
1,201Brochure about BSDCert

Notice:
The BSD Certification Group is now publishing analysis of their website statistics. Please visit our Webstats Site to see them for yourself.

8 About this Newsletter

The BSD Certification Group newsletter is published every month, near the middle of the month.

Thank you to Dru Lavigne for contributing to this newsletter. The editor is Jeremy C. Reed.

If you have any news items related to the BSD Certification, please let us know by submitting via the contact form on the website or by sending an email to newsletter@BSDCertificationGroup.org. Or if you would like to volunteer for the translation team please send a note with the subject ``translation'' on the website's contact form.



























































































































































































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