Do you consider yourself to be a new contributor to the PC-BSD project? In this context, new means within the last three years and contributions can be in the form of patches, code, documentation, translations, QA, or testing.

Kevin Carillo, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington, is gathering information for his research topic about the influence of newcomer experience on contributor behavior and performance in Free/Open Source Software communities. He is interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences.

If you would like to participate, complete his anonymous survey. Kevin will post news about his progress with this research and the results at his blog.

When completing the survey, select FreeBSD in question number one and specify PC-BSD and the type of contribution in question number two.

This year, the Southern California Linux Expo is presenting SCALE: The Next Generation. This event is designed to introduce youth to open source and to invite children to attend and participate in an open source conference.

In addition to the usual cool booth swag, we created a kid’s colouring and activity pamphlet designed for the younger set. This is available as a PDF download. Feel free to print out as many as you like and to distribute to your children and their friends, elementary school, etc. If you have any success stories with the pamphlet or have suggestions for the next version, let us know!

This Saturday, September 17, is Software Freedom Day (SFD). SFD is an annual global event that encourages open source software users to reach out to their local community to educate others about the benefits of using open source.

Frederic Muller, President of SFI, the non-profit organization behind Software Freedom Day, has been very helpful in encouraging FreeBSD and PC-BSD users to participate in SFD. A copy of PC-BSD was included with the 210 packages that were shipped to the pre-registered teams.

PC-BSD users are encouraged to put together a team and to register it on the SFD wiki. If you have not participated in SFD before, take a moment to read through the Start Guide for instructions on how to promote your team. If you do register a team, leave a comment so that we can mention it on the @bsdevents twitter feed.

A PC-BSD user asked on IRC the other day if it was possible to download PC-BSD wallpapers from the website. The Fibonacci and Hubble wallpapers have been added to the Wallpaper section of theArtwork page.

Sergio Ligregni’s presentation on PC-BSD is now available on Youtube. It is also available from this blog post.

On Saturday, April 9, Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISOL) will be hosting a virtual conference (in Spanish). Details for joining the conference using streaming media, Second Life, and IRC are at the FLISOL website.

Sergio Ligregni will be giving a presentation on PC-BSD and a link to his presentation video will be posted here once it is available. In the mean time, here is the abstract for the presentation and a bio for Sergio:

This presentation explains to non-Open Source users the PC-BSD operating system, with a little demo of its easy install. It is meant to be more a video to encourage people to use PC-BSD than a tutorial, talking about a little history, the advantages of using it (making special mention of students and casual computer users, and also strong computer users like system administrators) and some project info, i.e. the video tells that if you are about to start a Computer Science major, you can contact the project and get a lot of learning from it, contributing with its development. The video will be presented at FLISOL Virtual (Latin American Free and Open Source Software Installation Festival, virtual mode). This video mainly express the idea: “PC-BSD is ready for you, you just have to use it!”.

Sergio Ligregni, Computer Science Engineer, lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Currently he works as C++ Developer Architect for IBM, previous experience includes two years in C++ app development and one year in tech support and testing. He participated in Google Summer of Code 2010 with the Distributed Audit project (about to be implemented). He taught during one period at Queretaro’s Technological Institute a Programming Fundamentals class where he spread the word about FOSS, particularly PC-BSD.

The lead article in this month’s edition of the Open Source Business Resource was contributed by iXsystems. It describes some of the business reasons behind the company’s choice to use only FreeBSD and PC-BSD systems in its own infrastructure and provides a cost/savings comparison for both software and maintenance costs. It also contains some good references and percentages if you’re looking for something to show your manager.

Jesse Smith from DistroWatch (who himself has written about PC-BSD for BSD Mag and who has submitted many PBIs) recently asked DistroWatch readers to submit questions about PC-BSD for me to answer. The questions and answers appear in this week’s issue of Distrowatch.

A forum thread from earlier this year was brought up on the IRC channel this week. It appears that the Advocacy forum was lost during the forum migration so it was re-added today and is located here.

I also added a Get Involved! link to the main menubar of the website. There’s some content there but I’m sure there are many other suggestions that can be added. Please leave a comment here or start a thread on the Advocacy forum if you have other suggestions.