In this memo:
- Board Project Committments
- LOPSA Sysadmin Master Class at YAPC::NA Chicago June 19-20.
- LOPSA at TechBash May 10th in Wilkes-Barre, PA
- LOPSA Live May 8th at 4-5 PM Eastern
- Sponsor Thank Yous
A Message from the Board
The League has reached an inflection point in its history. Until this
point a lot of our effort was dedicated to creating an organization;
bookkeeping, bylaws, finances, and the like. This nuts and bolts work
was necessary to the creation of LOPSA. However, most of it was not
unique to system administration; a 501(c)(3) application may be
necessary to LOPSA's goals, but is not itself a member service.
Much of that activity has settled down. Therefore, it's now appropriate
to answer the question: "What now?". Given infinite time & money,
there's a lot we'd like to do for our members and the profession.
Every day, misinformation about IT issues percolates in the public
sphere, affecting everything from the learning of junior admins, to
hiring decisions, all the way to public policy. One cause of many is
that a lot of people feel qualified to talk about system administration
issues without having been sysadmins, and without the benefit of much
knowledge about our challenges. These problems cause our
infrastructure, our own careers, and ultimately the entire economy, to
suffer.
Education, outreach, and professional standards can do a great deal to
cure these ills. It's time to get started.
The Board has selected a number of projects for 2008 that will help meet
some critical aspects of our mission. We hope to expand the League's
reach and therefore its resources to meet ever more of our program
goals.
A mostly-volunteer effort takes some time and strain to get moving in
the right direction. Rather than leaving things open-ended and
nebulous, we've taken the further step of drawing lines in the sand on
each of these projects. We're not going to promise anything we don't
believe we can deliver, but we are making promises. These pledges will
both help keep us focused, and keep you aware of what the near future
holds for the League.
We've pledged to an expanded conference program with an emphasis on
partnering with at least three other organizations to deliver LOPSA
training at various events nationwide. This effort will help us reach
out to new audiences, but taking on less exposure and risk to the
League. We also commit to presenting two mini-conferences on college
campuses in 2008. It's great to present at a conference someone else
runs, but it's also important to organize our own events, to establish
the independence and importance of our profession. College campus hosts
offer us an easier, low-risk way of holding our own events.
We're also looking at membership outreach and communication. In the
past we've held sporadic LOPSA Live IRC focus group sessions. They're
usually quite positive; so this year, we commit to holding a #lopsa-live
every non-LISA month. In addition, we're going to better track queries
to the Board to be sure they are answered, and work harder on having a
consistent message prior to conferences and events. In addition, we
commit to revamping the material on the website on LOPSA, and creating
an "evangelist kit" consisting of slides and guidelines for
member-delivered presentations about LOPSA. We'll produce flyers,
brochures and other material for presenters to hand out. That will help
local members present on LOPSA to your co-workers, local group meetings,
or other audiences.
Our website remains a natural member service; however, we realize we've
never achieved anything near its potential both for member communication
and as a direct benefit to members and the wider public. Our
technological backend has hindered these efforts. Therefore, LOPSA
commits to upgrading Drupal and associated modules with the goal of
providing a better user experience making it easier to create and
navigate content.
Membership communication through electronic channels is critical, but
sometimes nothing substitutes for seeing people in person and
interacting face to face. Therefore, local chapters are a critical and
growing part of our efforts. To aid that, we commit to improving
chapters and locals support in 2008 by starting five new chapters and
producing a new chapter kit. In addition, The Board commits to a strong
LOPSA presence at LISA 2008; we'll host a meeting with members, and once
again host the LOPSA After Dark suite.
Most importantly, it's critical we contribute to the profession as a
whole. We've been working for a year or so on a Resume Standards
Project, to help produce a standard that will reduce the confusion
around how to create a resume that accurately and fairly reflects your
expertise in a given technology, letting you stand apart from the
search-engine driven resumes that throw out every term they can think
of. The time has come to move this work forward, so LOPSA commits to
producing a white paper on the Resume Standards Project and a draft
standard on skill-level nomenclature in 2008.
To tie these efforst all together, we're going to be adopted a
League-wide standard project management tool, which will help keep us on
track and assist our Executive Director's noble efforts to flog us
along.
And, as if that all weren't enough, we have two projects on the front
burner that we have not yet committed to, but are actively researching
for feasibility. The first is a member email service for members to
have permanent email accounts through LOPSA; we're hoping to use this to
tie in with some of the leading spam and virus filtering appliances on
the market. The second project is we're looking into the idea of a
monthly Podcast on system administration issues for members.
That's a daunting list. We're moving from a policy-driven phase of
LOPSA to an action-driven phase, but we feel that's a positive, and
critical, transition to make. System administrators are ultimately
doers, and it's going to be good for the League to center around doing
what's best for our members and our profession.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, or interest in helping
any of the above projects, please by all means send us a note to
board@lopsa.org.
LOPSA Sysadmin Master Class at YAPC::NA, Chicago
Members of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) are
teaching a two day System Administration Master Class at the Yet Another
Perl Conference North America (YAPC::NA), in Chicago, IL, USA, on June
19 and 20. The instructors, David Parter and Jesse Trucks, will delve
into more than a dozen areas of the profession of system administration
critical to all system administrators of any discipline. The course is
technology neutral, and people managing any and all types of systems and
networks are encouraged to attend.
The class will involve guided discussions seeded with topical
presentations by the instructors. Participants will share ideas and
experiences to fuel discussion, and everyone will take away new industry
contacts, ideas to implement at the office, and a renewed understanding
of the practice and profession of system administration.
Find out more at https://lopsa.org/YAPCNA2008Class. The YAPC::NA
website is at http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2008/.
LOPSA Booth at TechBash
LOPSA will have a booth at TechBash, a premier technology conference in
Northeastern Pennsylvania which attracts over 300 developers, sysadmins,
managers and others across the region. People near to northeastern
Pennsylvania should drop by and say hello to the LOPSA Booth; if you're
interested in helping out, send us an email.
More on TechBash at http://techbash.com.
Furthermore, if there's a technical conference in your local area where
you'd like to represent LOPSA, please let us know; we'll set you up with
everything you need.
May LOPSA Live!
LOPSA Live is a chance for members of LOPSA to interact directly with
members of the Board. You can ask questions, make suggestions and give
feedback in a smaller, "focus group" online chat.
Join us on IRC in the channel #lopsa-live at irc.lopsa.org from 4-5 PM
Eastern Time on Thursday, May 8th to talk about anything and everything
LOPSA.
Note the different time: we move the timing around to ensure that people
with scheduling conflicts will be able to participate eventually.
Please let us know if you have questions about LOPSA Live.
Sponsor thank-yous
We'd like to thank our sponsors.
This message, our website and all our online content is brought to you
by BitPusher, our Gold Corporate Sponsor. BitPusher is the San
Francisco Bay Area's premier provider of managed information technology
services for small and medium-sized businesses. We thank them for their
continued, high level of professional support.
See more about BitPusher at http://www.bitpusher.com
Thanks also go out to our Platinum sponsor Dasher Technologies. Dasher
Technologies is an enterprise IT reseller offering a wide range of
computing infrastructure solutions. They provide HP rack and blade
servers, storage, networking, workstations, and software, along with
many complementary software solutions. Dasher is the #3 provider of HP
blade servers in the US and #1 in Northern California.
See more about Dasher at http://www.dashertechnologies.com
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