Daemon News in to the Future

By Chris Coleman chrisc@vmunix.com

Many of you may be wondering where Daemon News Ezine has been for the past couple of months. This issue happens to be at least four months late. However, you should be happy that it is finally done. I also have the next issue almost done and I can guarantee it won't take four months to get published. In fact, I plan on getting completely caught up.

The recent several months have been very busy for me. Real life has caught up with me and taken its toll on my free time. All of my attention has gone into providing for my family. I have a beautiful wife and three darling children that take as much of my time as they can get. My oldest is in Kindergarten.

As much as I like writing and working with BSD, the ezine has had to take a back seat to paying jobs. This was true for me as well as for many of the other volunteers who have faithfully helped publish the ezine for over six years. Most of the other regulars are busy with their day jobs and don't have time, even though they would like to help.

I know I have really appreciated all the help they have given to make this ezine function for the past several years. In addition to the authors and managing editors, there have been many people who donate time for just one or two issues to help edit and proofread the articles. And as we have noticed, without their help, the ezine just doesn't get published.

New Volunteers Opportunities

So, I'm doing some re-organization. In a way I'm going back to some of the original ideas we used when we first started DN. When we first started things, we had an additional person for each position to take the load off of any one person. Now, I'm opening up all the Managing Editor positions, and even looking for an additional Editor in Chief so that I don't become the bottleneck anymore.

I need a Managing editor for each BSD: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly, Darwin/OSX, etc.
Your job would be to find one article for each issue about your BSD.

A Managing Editor has four responsibilities:

1. Contact authors and find BSD articles to publish, or write an article if you can't find someone to write it for you.
2. Put the article into the DN publishing system. Minor CVS skills are required and can be easily taught.
3. Manage the article throughout the publishing process, helping edit it for technical correctness.
4. Publicize the article after it has been published.

These tasks aren't very difficult and require more time than knowledge; however, the more BSD knowledge you posess, the better. These positions are all volunteer, but they do come with a few perks, such as an @daemonnews.org e-mail address and nifty stuff from BSDmall.com when available. It usually takes about 1-2 hours per week to keep up on this job.

PHP Programming

If you are interested, please send me an e-mail.