2021 in Review: Advocacy

It’s hard to believe that it’s that time again. We’re looking back at how we advocated for FreeBSD over the past year. Just like for many of you, 2021 did not quite turn out as we had hoped. However, the Foundation staff continued to navigate the unknown while working together to expand the ways to spread the word about FreeBSD. We were even lucky enough to grow the advocacy team. Take a look at what we’ve been doing for the past year.

While we were only able to attend one in-person event this past year, we were still able to sponsor, present and organize 22 events in 2021 including the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit and the November 2021 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Videos from the Summits can be found on the Project’s YouTube channel. 

We continued our popular FreeBSD Fridays program with sessions on an Introduction to BastilleBSD, How to Submit a Patch to FreeBSD, How to Track FreeBSD Using Git, Part 1 and the Writing Scholar’s Guide to FreeBSD. We look forward to continuing the series in 2022. In addition to the FreeBSD Fridays Series, our What’s New in FreeBSD 13.0 video was our most watched video of 2021. 

We also added new How-To and Quick Start guides to help folks get started using FreeBSD. These guides include a Contributing FreeBSD Documentation, How to Submit a Bug Report, Contributing to FreeBSD as a Programmer, and Updating FreeBSD From Git.

From our Technology Roadmap to the Status of Online Conference Software on FreeBSD, our blogs gave you a snapshot of the latest software development work, showed you what was working on FreeBSD, and introduced you to some of the new folks working on the Project.  Check out what you might have missed here. 

We’re also very proud to say that you can still access the FreeBSD Journal for Free. Being able to bring all of the informative articles to the community at no cost to the reader is just one of the ways we’re continuing to advocate for the Project. We’ve also made it easier to access individual articles. If you haven’t read it yet, please take a look and share with your friends and colleagues. 

In 2021, we took a bit of a hiatus on the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter, but it made a comeback this Fall. We did, however, continue to produce the quarterly status reports. Both are 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 updates from us, please do so at the bottom of this page. A full list of what we’ve accomplished by quarter can be found here. 

As mentioned above, we were very excited to bring on new members of the advocacy team. Drew Gurkowski joined us as a marketing coordinator and a new technical writer will be making their FreeBSD debut at the end of the year. 

As you can see, the Foundation advocacy team had a very productive 2021 in spite of everything.  We were able to grow the team and accomplish so much this year, in part, because of the financial support from the FreeBSD community. Your commitment to the Project is truly inspiring. Thank you for your continued support and if you’re able, please consider making a donation today. We can’t do this without you!