2019 in Review: Advocacy

It’s that time again for our year in review. We’ll start our look back at 2019 with a review of how your support helped us advocate for FreeBSD. Advocacy is a big part of our mission, and we have dedicated a lot of time and funding to spreading the word about FreeBSD over the past year. From giving talks, and staffing tables, to holding workshops and organizing summits, the Foundation team promoted FreeBSD at 38 events all over the world. Ten more events than last year!  In March, the Foundation held our first ever a FreeBSD track at SCALE 17x which included an all-day Getting Started with FreeBSD workshop. We presented for the first time at the Open Source Summit North American in San Diego, CA and Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon, France, adding a FreeBSD presence to primarily linux-focused events. We presented about FreeBSD for the first time at SeaGL in Seattle, WA, and represented FreeBSD at MMNOG-1 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We also made a return appearance to All Things Open in Raleigh NC, OSCON in Portland OR, and COSCon in Shanghai, China.   Find out more about our global advocacy efforts in 2019 in our FreeBSD Around the World blog.

The Foundation recognizes the importance of bringing members of the FreeBSD community face-to-face to both further development of the Project and spread the word about FreeBSD. This year we participated in 11 FreeBSD events including sponsoring the FreeBSD DevSummit at BSDCan and sponsoring the Bay Area Vendor and Developer Summit. We also awarded 9 travel grants. Travel grants 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 2020. 

We’re also excited to announce the release of three new How-to-Guides including a guide to setting up a basic Minecraft server on FreeBSD. 

2019 began with a big announcement regarding the FreeBSD Journal. You can now access every issue for Free! We’re very excited to be able to bring all of the informative articles to the community at no cost. If you haven’t read it yet, please take a look and share with your friends and colleagues. 

Our new store opened this summer and provides the opportunity for those not able to visit our booth at conferences, to pick up their favorite FreeBSD branded swag.  You’ll also find PDFs of stickers, flyers, and other FreeBSD related materials on the resources page. 

We continued to produce Newsletters and Quarterly Status reports. 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.  If you haven’t yet signed up to receive monthly updates from us, please do so at the bottom of this page. 

As you can see, the Foundation team had a very busy and productive 2019. We were able to accomplish so much this year, 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