Happy New Year everyone, wishing all of you fellow nerds and nerdettes out there a wonderful year. As we end the year, we at GeekBeacon wanted to take a look back at 2021 and highlight some of the rosier accomplishments that stood out this past year.

This year we want to try to do a better job of sharing all that GeekBeacon is about and share with the community at large. Not everyone is always aware of everything we do. Whether you’re a community member and actively participating in our events, attending our study groups, or just interacting with the community, we are thankful for your participation in spreading geekiness and the values of OSS wherever you are.

This year has been quite an interesting year for GeekBeacon. We’ve had many accomplishments the past year, despite the struggles of the pandemic. With the vast majority of our community being on Discord, we have had many changes, such as BeaconBot, our own custom-build Discord Bot, introducing a leveling and leaderboard system. Be sure to join and check out the community events channel to keep up-to-date with all the happenings constantly being rolled out.

Structural Changes and Supporting Tools.

Discord Bot

Though much of the effort was spearheaded by our community manager, Kankuro, over the past year we’re created our own custom Discord Bot. For better or worse much of our community has been growing around our discord server and having the right tooling to help us manage events, moderation, and other facets has become more and more critical. Thanks to the efforts of Kankuro and other community members, we are able to run the various events we have at the scale that we have. Keeping with the OSS mentality our bot is naturally open source. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

GeekBeacon Foundation

In keeping with the spirit of Open Source we’ve also been struggling to find our identity and a structure that will allow us to run events, raise funds, and have the transparency that we all appreciate in an OSS community. We would like to thank the Open Collective Foundation for hosting our small organization. If you haven’t heard of them before, Open Collective is an organization that takes on the burden of liability, accounting, and a variety of other services and allows smaller organizations like us to establish themselves as a hosted entity. We’ll start using the foundation more and more in the upcoming year. OCF grants us a 501c(3) status which makes us a non-profit, any donations that we receive will be tax deductible. It will also enable us to raise money for future events like GeekBeacon Fest (more details further down) to bring geeks together in a celebration of Open Culture and Open Source.

Events In Review

Video Game Event Highlights

Nixie has always had a love and appreciation of IndieGames. As such in 2021 GeekBeacon and NixiePixel have hosted several independent games as part of streams, premieres or simply a game play introduction to unique games that don’t get nearly the attention they deserve.

Moduwar

Earlier in 2021, Nixie Pixel premiered the amazing and unique RTS game Moduwar from indie developer Biohex Games. The gameplay livestream also featured a real time Q&A session with the developers!

Moduwar takes on a very unique approach to RTS. You play an alien creature with the ability to grow different organs, split, and merge them, depending on your personal playstyle. It allows for an extremely flexible gameplay that is adaptable to your own personal style and personality.

Longest Road On Earth

Nixie also showcased “The Longest Road on Earth” in another indie adventure, an ultra-chill game experience with a winding story and lofi-style soundtrack from developers Brainwash Games and TLR Games.

Minecraft Competition

We also hosted a Minecraft competition for valentines day. Giving everyone the opportunity to exercise their creative juices and impress us with their 8-bit and 16-bit mastery. GeekBeacon and Nixie Pixel judged a Minecraft building competition and giveaway in collaboration with Linux Cafe (A collective of Linux and open-source software users, tech lovers, and privacy enthusiasts working together to create a welcoming environment and give a comfortable space for all Linux and tech enthusiasts to come together.)

Panels and Fundraising Events

Boys and Girls Club Fundraiser

If you’re not familiar with them, The Boys & Girls Club is a national nonprofit organization with chapters all across the country to run after school programs for young people. It was founded in 1860 by three women and now is still going strong serving more than 4 million boys and girls.

Our founder, NixiePixel, collaborated with LanFest to help bring out a successful fundraiser for this great organization. The event featured stars such as Katy Perry and Terry Crews and had a focus on gaming and education.

During the event Nixie interviewed Carlos Ferro, video to be released soon! Carlos' resume includes Dom from Gears of War, DaVinci from Assassin’s Creed, Dern (red shirt) from Star Trek the Next Generation, and many more! See the instagram story of the event here!

Panels, Panels and more Panels!!

Women’s Tech & Gaming Industry Expert Panel

During The Boys & Girls Club Nixie also hosted a Tech & Gaming Industry Expert Panel - LanFest LIVE Charity Festival. Keep an eye out for it. Video will be released soon. Our little llama editors are working on the final cut. Here’s a teaser.

Seen above are: WidowOnTwitch, JadeValkyrie, NixiePixel

Techlore Privacy Panel

Techlore hosted a privacy panel to discuss issues impacting the #privacy world. Thank you to Techlore for inviting our very own NixiePixel to share her thoughts on the segment! Please join NixiePixel, Sean O’Brien, SwitchedToLinux, Nike from privacytoolsIO. Teaser, bloopers, and full panel discussion can be found below.

Teaser:

Full Panel

Bloopers:

Future Events

Also, as the year ends and a new one begins, we’d like to remind everybody that we have GeekBeacon Fest, our first conference, coming up on February 18th and 19th!

Free registration is available here. Have a presentation or “daemonstration”, and you’d like a time slot? You can get live time or submit a pre-recorded segment! Submission deadlines are February 4th, 2021 for papers and February 10th, 2021 for recorded media.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for the upcoming year with GeekBeacon! There will be more livestreams, more games, and more events. 2022 is going to be our biggest yet!