We at HardenedBSD are working towards starting up a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization in the USA. Setting up this organization will allow future donations to be tax deductible. We've made progress and would like to share with you the current state of affairs.

We have identified, sent invitations out, and received acceptance letters from seven people who will serve on the HardenedBSD Foundation Board of Directors. You can find their bios below. In the latter half of June 2018 or the beginning half of July 2018, we will meet for the first time as a board and formally begin the process of creating the documentation needed to submit to the local, state, and federal tax services.

Here's a brief introduction to those who will serve on the board:

1. W. Dean Freeman (Advisor): Dean has ten years of professional experience with deploying and securing Unix and networking systems, including assessing systems security for government certification and assessing the efficacy of security products. He was introduced to Unix via FreeBSD 2.2.8 on an ISP shell account as a teenager. Formerly, he was the Snort port maintainer for FreeBSD while working in the Sourcefire VRT, and has contributed entropy-related patches to the FreeBSD and HardenedBSD projects -- a topic on which he presented at vBSDCon 2017.
2. Ben La Monica (Advisor): Ben is a Senior Technology Manager of Software Engineering at Morningstar, Inc and has been developing software for over 15 years in a variety of languages. He advocates open source software and enjoys tinkering with electronics and home automation.
3. George Saylor (Vice President): George is a Technical Directory at G2, Inc. Mr. Saylor has over 28 years of information systems and security experience in a broad range of disciplines. His core focus areas are automation and standards in the event correlation space as well as penetration and exploitoation of computer systems. Mr Saylor was also a co-founder of the OpenSCAP project.
4. Christian Severt (Advisor): Christian is an information security engineer. He served in the U.S. Navy administering classified Command, Control, Communication, Computers & Intelligence (C4I) systems. Christian also volunteers with the Seattle Privacy Coalition.
5. Virginia Suydan (Treasury, secretary, and general administrator): Accountant and general administrator for the HardenedBSD Foundation. She has worked with Shawn Webb for tax and accounting purposes for over six years.
6. Shawn Webb (President and Director): Co-founder of HardenedBSD and all-around infosec wonk. He has worked and played in the infosec industry, doing both offensive and defensive research, for around fifteen years. He loves open source technologies and likes to frustrate the bad guys.
7. Ben Welch (Advisor): Ben is currently a Security Engineer at G2, Inc. He graduated from Pennsylvania College of Technology with a Bachelors in Information Assurance and Security. Ben likes long walks, beaches, candlelight dinners, and attending various conferences like BSides and ShmooCon.