Actual news this month, including: Dates! Donations! Dinosaurs!
No. Wait. No dinosaurs. Sorry, my bad, carry on.
The bsdcan.org web site has a splash screen giving the 2024 dates. Why a splash screen? We’re still looking to get the web site moved from Dan’s control to ours. Dan is being fully cooperative, but the computers are being jerks. We have hopes for this week, but we must get the date out this week. (Why this week? FreeBSD is having a vendor summit this weekend and our fine, fearless, fulminous sponsorship coordinator will be there shaking hands and smiling and holding out the hat. Having actual dates will grant his efforts gravitas. (If any other BSD project invites a bunch of vendors to a meeting, we would appreciate a heads-up so we can dispatch Mister Dexter. (Better him than me, that’s all I can say.)))
Speaking of money, quite a few folks have offered to send us a few bucks to help us restart. The email address funding@bsdcan.org is now live at Paypal. Your nickels and dimes will help us grease the rails into 2024.
We’ve also decided on a greater amount of financial transparency. Our goal is for BSDCan to develop sufficient resources to carry us through another bad year. We won’t achieve that in one year, or two. Maaaybe five, if we’re lucky. But a couple slides at the closing session saying “This is about what we spent, this is about what came in, here’s where we are, thank you” will go a long way.
We’ve had a serious discussion on the mask policy, and the consensus is it stands for 2024. None of us like it. We all eagerly look forward to the day it won’t be needed. Some folks live in communities that have abandoned masks except for medical reasons, while other communities still wear them rigorously. But many of us are especially vulnerable. We are biased towards safety, and while we can’t control the hallways where students walk around we can control the event rooms.
We also had another discussion around ancillary events. We want to remind folks that we’d like to welcome any projects that want to host adjacent meetings. If you’d like to plan such an event, please let us know as soon as possible. Adam is still running under the Big Giant Lock and needs time to prepare.
So. What’s your favorite dinosaur?