News and Announcements

Apr 18, 2007 - April Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

BSD Certification Group Newsletter
April 2007


Contents

1 New BSDCG Members

We're pleased to welcome two new BSDCG members from the OpenBSD community: Jason Dixon and Wim Vandeputte. Their bios should show up shortly on the Meet Us page of the website.

2 SME Policy

An SME Policy has been drafted and will be published on the BSDCG page of the website. The policy includes the measures taken to protect the integrity of the exam questions and details the roles and access privileges of those involved in creating the exam.

SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) assist in question writing and verifying the technical accuracy of the questions and answers. They work closely with the psychometrician to ensure the questions are fair and match the exam objectives and the intended exam audience. The BSDCG is fortunate to have SMEs representing each of the BSD projects. The SMEs for the initial BSDA exam are:

  • Jim Brown
  • Jason Dixon
  • Hubert Feyrer
  • Liam Foy
  • Mikel King
  • Dan Langille
  • Dru Lavigne
  • Brad Schonhorst
The psychometrician is Sandra Dolan, PhD.

3 Upcoming BSDA Beta Exams

We'll be announcing shortly the details and registration link for the upcoming BSDA beta exam. We have been able to confirm the following venues:

  • [BSDCan:] Ottawa, Canada, May 18 and 19
  • [LinuxTag:] Berlin, Germany, May 30, June 1, and June 2
  • [Mohawk College:] Hamilton, Canada
  • [FreeBSD Brazil-LTDA:] Bela Horizonte, Brazil (and maybe Sao Paulo)
Stay tuned to the mailing list for the official announcement.

4 BSDA at LinuxTag

LinuxTag, held every summer in Germany, is said to be the largest free software expo in Europe. This year it will he held from May 30 to June 2.

There will be a BSDCG booth managed by allbsd.de. (It might be shared with FreeBSD.)

As mentioned above, the BSDA Beta Exam will be offered at LinuxTag. Stay tuned for details.

In addition, Machtelt Garrels will be giving a report on the status of our BSD Certification. The abstract of the talk includes:

  • Why yac (yet another certification)?
  • Progress report: where do we stand, available languages, can I do the exam in my country, sponsors and the cost of developing exams, what certifications are available and which are planned?
  • What do you need to know? Who is the intended audience? An overview of the exam objectives in the categories of system administration, installing and upgrading, security, files and file systems, user account management, network administration and UNIX skills. Commitment to testing real-world skills, not just a paper exam. Who defined these objectives? An overview of the Task Survey Analysis.
  • Study resources: where can you find training materials, how to prepare for the exam.
  • Testing methodology, the importance of using psychometrics.

5 BSDwiki Study Guide Status

The BSDA Study Guide book is behind publishing schedule. If you can help review or write a little content it would be much appreciated. This is an open source book that will also be sold in print book format. The website is at http://bsdwiki.reedmedia.net/wiki/.

The latest status report follows:

  • 73 people registered as wiki users
  • 969 commits (wiki updates) by 39 users
  • 16 users with at least 5 commits
  • 6 users with at least 25 commits
  • 50 sections have an author signed up (15 total authors)
  • 41 sections have at least one technical reviewer signed up (14 total technical reviewers)
  • 71 sections have at least an author or technical reviewer signed up
  • List of topics needing someone to sign up is at http://bsdwiki.reedmedia.net/need-responsible.html
  • approximately 89 sections have topic in progress
  • approximately 38 sections have significant content (and maybe almost finished)
  • 104 sections total - all with concept prewritten
  • approximately 10 sections have new content that do not have an author or technical reviewer assigned
  • 22 PDF files generated
  • book is 201 total printed pages, around 190 content pages, 3 page index
  • 4426 PDF files downloaded
  • Table of Contents wiki page downloaded 3563 times

6 Website Statistics

Online webstats are available at http://webstats.bsdcertification.org/.

7 Mailing Lists

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 from the BSD Certification Group.

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

The bsdcert list has around 743 members and the bsdcert-announce list has around 218 subscribers.

8 About this Newsletter

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

Thank you to Machtelt Garrels and 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.

Do you read this newsletter? Please let us know if you read the PDF, webpage, or emailed version. Any comments or advice? Is it useful for you?

If you are interested in contributing tutorials or useful howto articles for an upcoming newsletter, please email us.



























































































































































































Hosted by:

All trademarks are owned by their respective companies.
Copyright © 2006 - 2008, The BSD Certification Group Inc.(SM) All Rights Reserved.