[BSDCert-Announce] BSD Certification Group Newsletter for April 2006
Announce list for the BSD Certification
bsdcert-announce at lists.nycbug.org
Sat Apr 22 19:11:15 EDT 2006
The BSD Certification Group Newsletter for April 2006 was published on
April 15. The online and PDF versions are available
http://www.bsdcertification.org/index.php?NAV=News&Item=nl028
BSD Certification Group Newsletter
April 2006
Contents
* 1 BSD Certification at Cebit
* 2 BSD Certification at the Chemnitz Linuxdays
* 3 BSD Certification an UKUUG Spring Conference
* 4 BSD Certification at BSDCan
* 5 BSD Certification at Linuxworld Boston
* 6 Mailing Lists
* 7 Website Statistics
* 8 About this Newsletter
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
transferred 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, 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. The Gantt chart shows this is
coming. The News, Meet Us, and the FAQ webpages get a lot 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:
16,918 BSD Certification Roadmap
3,743 Exam Objectives
3,217 Task Analysis Survey Report
2,236 Usage Survey Report
1,201 Brochure 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 and Michael 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 at 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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