2018 in Review: Advocacy

As we continue our look back at 2018, let’s take a look at how your support helped us advocate for theProject. Advocacy is a big part of our mission, and we dedicated a lot of time and funding to spreading the word about FreeBSD over the past year. From giving talks, and staffing tables to handing out flash drives preloaded with the latest release, the Foundation team promoted FreeBSD at 28 events all over the world. For the first time, the Foundation added a FreeBSD presence to All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina and we held a week long workshop in Tonga.

May marked the first Foundation-hosted installfest led by Foundation Executive Director, Deb Goodkin and FreeBSD contributor Roller Angel. Deb also gave FreeBSD presentations at OSCON and together with Roller taught an Intro to FreeBSD Workshop to over 30 women at the Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing. Materials for hosting your own installfest are now available on the Foundation website. You can also find PDFs of stickers, flyers, and the new quickstart guide on our resources page.

June brought about a very special FreeBSD Day as June 19, 2018 marked the 25th Anniversary of the FreeBSD Project. The community celebrated throughout the year with cake at BSDCan, an iXsystems sponsored party at MeetBSD, interviews with founding members, a historical timeline, and lots of commemorative swag. You can still check out the timeline and read some of the BSDNow interviews on the Foundation website.

We also returned to the monthly format for our newsletter and, in June, debuted a new look. If you haven’t yet signed up to receive monthly updates from us, please do so using this form. The newsletter is an excellent way to find out about upcoming grant and CFP submission deadlines, get ongoing updates from our software development team, and find out more about where we’re going and where we’ve been to promote FreeBSD around the world.

Speaking of traveling, the Foundation was able to send 14 FreeBSD community members to BSD-related events around the world. Our travel grants are designed to foster in person collaboration to both further development of the Project and spread the word about FreeBSD. They are available to community members who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development and advocacy. The next round of travel grant deadlines will be announced in early 2019.

As you can see, the Foundation team had a very busy and productive 2019. We were able to accomplish so much in 2018, in part, because of the financial support from the FreeBSD community. Your commitment to the Project is inspiring.

Thank you for your continued support and if you haven’t yet donated this year, please consider making a donation today. We can’t do this without you!

– contributed by Anne Dickison