Announcing Several Advocacy Sites

[Melanie Vonfange]

Hi, I am Melanie VonFange, long time lurker and fan of FreeBSD and
PC-BSD.  I have been around for about a year on various forums and
mailing lists learning all I can about FreeBSD and PC-BSD.  I imagine
I met quite a few of you at  MeetBSDCalifornia '08. *waves*.  One of
the things that really excited me was putting a face with a name. The
BSD community at large is extremely friendly and open and I was happy
to be able to sit in on the talks and meet everyone.

I am pleased to have been given the opportunity to help out with a few
advocacy sites and I hope to share some of my excitement here.  One of
our main goals is to break down the market barriers for BSD adoption
and I feel we have a few ways to do that now.  People WANT to do
something different.  They feel that they are limited to either
Windows or Linux or Mac OS X.  A few people have heard of Unbuntu, but
your average everyday user feels that they have no choice in what
Operating System they use.  I think we all want to change that.

One barrier is name recognition. We need get the name out there. One
way we have to do that is SpreadBSD.org (http://www.SpreadBSD.org), an
affiliate site designed and to spread the message of FreeBSD and
PC-BSD via message boards,blogs,forums and other social networking
platforms. SpreadBSD will be a place to collect advocacy information
as well. This should help by having a central repository of
information to educate and influence executive and IT management.
There is even a karma points system. Currently we are looking for
articles and and appreciate any suggestions you might have as to how
we can make it better.

A second barrier is helping non-tech people understand what FreeBSD
and PC-BSD are. My own biggest barrier was finding the information
about installation, known hardware issues, whether it would work with
my computer etc, all in a central location. I spent alot of time
googling, fearing the install, and trying to figure out things on my
own.  I am one of the lucky people that has friends who are behind
FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Not everyone is so lucky. I set up a social
networking group called PC-BSD Users on the ning.com social networking
site (http://pcbsdusers.ning.com/) I added some videos about
installing and I plan on adding more user-friendly tutorials and make
it more of a community site. I would be happy to add any suggestions
you might have and invite you all to join me.

A huge third barrier is application and driver support. We need to
have more, obviously. Time is also a valuable commodity. We are also
limited by proprietary drivers and programs.SponsorBSD Projects
(http//:www.sponsorBSD.org) gives people the opportunity to network
and connect sponsors with developers. Right now, the site needs a
little bit of TLC (mainly in the form of coders and designers) and
test sponsors and developers. I know that setting time to work on
things is a bit difficult and this is a centralized way rather than
having to dig around postings and not being sure where to put
advertisements for development.We also plan on adding a developer wish
list and development teams will be able to split the bounty
automatically.

This is truly exciting time, and I hope we all work together to get
the name out there. If you want to volunteer for any of these projects
or have any suggestions, please feel free to email me. We have a great
OS, and it just needs more people to know about it!  So 3 sites to
check out, http://www.SpreadBSD.org, http://www.sponsorBSD.org   and
http://pcbsdusers.ning.com/

--
Melanie VonFange
PC-BSD Project
BSD Advocate
Melanie at pcbsd.org