BSD user groups and meetups - killed off by Covid?

BigSneakyDuck

BigSneakyDuck

Local BSD user groups exist, or existed, all over the world: https://www.freebsd.org/usergroups/

But looking down that list, there are a lot of dead links these days! Were a lot of local groups and meetups finished off by Covid? Or have some of these contact details just got stale?

I did a bit of crowdsourcing on Reddit, and found enough confirmation to get five groups removed from the list as defunct (Ulm, UK, Manchester, Seattle, Jogja) and update the contact information for another. Also one reactivated group in Brazil turned up and will hopefully get reinstated to the list. https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-doc/pull/660

The following groups in the list at least appear to have some kind of functioning web presence:
Can anyone confirm what's happened to other groups?

I believe NYC*BUG played a coordinating role with some of the smaller BSD user groups and hosted their (now dead) websites. So perhaps someone there will be able to confirm whether those other groups have disbanded.
 
cracauer@ said:
bsdhh (Hamburg) is very much active. Not sure why it doesn't show up in the list. www.bsdhh.org

We lost out 30 year restaurant lately, though.
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It's still on https://www.freebsd.org/usergroups/ don't worry. My list above was incomplete.
The BSD User Group Hamburg (BSDHH) meets on the first Wednesday of the month at 7.00pm in the restaurant Léon (Koppel 1, 20099 Hamburg). Most members are FreeBSD users, although users of all BSD flavors are welcome. Located in Germany, Hamburg.
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Does that need updating to meeting at "Restaurant Shanghai House (Borsteler Chaussee 110, 22453 Hamburg)"? https://www.bsdhh.org/bsdhh-de-treffen.html
 
mro said:
may I add https://unix-freunde.mro.name - started last year in rural southern Bavaria.
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That's great, having a website is very helpful! The official requirements are:
If you know of a FreeBSD user group not listed here, please fill out a problem report in category Documentation→Website with the following information:
  1. A URL for the user group’s website.
  2. An email contact address of a human in charge, for use by our visitors and website administrators.
  3. A short (one paragraph) description of the user group.
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In practice some groups use a social media account for the communication instead of an email contact.

Do you have a Bugzilla account so you can file a problem report at https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/ ?

Otherwise you can request an account but it isn't instantaneous.
 
cracauer@ said:
Yes, please update.

We had the same restaurant since the first meeting, for 30 years minus 1 month. That went through 2 kitchen fires. But they folded 1 month too early for 30 years, so there's a new toy now.
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30 years is really impressive, even give or take the month! Lasted a lot longer than many of the other user grops. I've put in a PR for the update, thought I'd include a link to the "treffen" page of the website in case anyone wants to check for venue changes in future. My last user group PR went through very quickly so hopefully this one will too. https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-doc/pull/663
 
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The NYC BSD group is still active. When they first started, Apple provided a place to meet, back when Apple were more of the good guys. I think the first version of OSX had come out a bit before. Now, it's usually a downtown restaurant.

NYC*BUG

New York City BSD User Group
www.nycbug.org
 
BigSneakyDuck said:
I did a bit of crowdsourcing on Reddit, and found enough confirmation to get five groups removed from the list as defunct (Ulm, UK, Manchester, Seattle, Jogja) and update the contact information for another. Also one reactivated group in Brazil turned up and will hopefully get reinstated to the list.
Click to expand...

Well that explains why I couldn't find the Seattle group when I went to look. Dang...
 
BigSneakyDuck said:
I did a bit of crowdsourcing on Reddit, and found enough confirmation to get five groups removed from the list as defunct
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that's vital hygiene but IMO there should be a low-overhead process like e.g. a yearly email to each meetup's mandatory email address with a canary confirmation link.
If that doesn't come back in 1 month, remove and another removal confirmation email. Done.
 
brendanl said:
Well that explains why I couldn't find the Seattle group when I went to look. Dang...
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Their website was www.seabug.org but it's been dead for a while. Looks like they were still quite active in the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20031001083409/http://www.seabug.org/

What I was told by someone who was about at the time is that "Seabug made an effort to restart some 10 years ago. Didn’t take." Which seems consistent with a brief flurry of activity on their website before it turned into an advert for Linux VPNs then finally went dead.

I know there are some active FreeBSD devs in the area though, a few work at Microsoft. I don't know if there'd be interest locally in starting something up again.

mro said:
obviously the process seems a PR in opposition to what's written on https://www.freebsd.org/usergroups/.
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At the moment documentation on whether to use GitHub PRs or Bugzilla PRs for FreeBSD docs issues in general (which includes the website) is in a bit of flux. But not all the people active on Bugzilla use GitHub, and I think that includes several of the people who like to check over user group additions. (That's partly to check if groups are active and contact details work, but some user groups also offer commercial services so there can be a spam problem.)

So far no groups have been added by GitHub PR, though several have been removed or updated. The most recent three additions (Malta, Saudi, Türkiye) were all done recently via Bugzilla PR, so the process still works.
 
BigSneakyDuck said:
I know there are some active FreeBSD devs in the area though, a few work at Microsoft. I don't know if there'd be interest locally in starting something up again.
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When I worked at Isilon/EMC/Dell I was working with FreeBSD. I tried to get some others at work interested in supporting SeaBUG but didn't get much traction. These days work is all Linux based but I'm moving my home systems to FreeBSD for a variety of reasons. Sadly, I don't have connections with them any more.
 
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