Two years ago, when I first ran for board election, my candidate statement
started "In information technology, we often are overwhelmed by the huge
technological changes that appear to happen every day." In the past two
years, as an organization we have learned that there are not just huge
technological changes that happen every day, but also huge social,
political, and organization changes that happen as well.
I am seeking re-election to the board to continue to move forward on the
issues I laid out two years ago: establishment of the organization, an
organized body of knowledge, member benefits, and community building.
Due to circumstances, establishment became to a large extent the only issue on
which we could focus. Now, it is time for us to begin to focus on knowledge, real
member benefits, and community.
During the past two years on the board, I served as co-chair to the
development committee, the combined development/partnership committee, and the content
services committees. I led the effort to review the Code of Ethics, to have
USENIX de-brand it, and to enable LOPSA and other future organizations to
become signatories. I have been a strong proponent of fiscal responsibility
and recently drove the effort to establish a Finance Committee.
As co-chair of the development committee, I was responsible for developing
our sponsorship policies, levels, and benefits. When it became apparent
that we had structured our sponsorships and partnerships similarly, I
proposed the consolidation of those committees to ensure we had proper focus on those
activities. I have worked closely with the development director at AH, and
with several of our partners, such as O'Reilly and Pearson Education, to
provide benefits to our members.
As content committee co-chairs, Chris Palmer and I developed the
organizational structure for our content/editorial group. I started and ran the Book
of the Month, the LOPSA Bookreviews, and the LOPSA Bookshelf. Recently, I have
reached out to members on two new content efforts, the Sysadmin Hints and
Shortcuts. Although I have been far from prolific, I have also attempted to
maintain a blog with a variety of what I hope is interesting content.
LOPSA faces three highly interwoven challenges: financial, membership, and
content. LOPSA relies heavily on memberships and sponsorships for its
financing. In order to improve our financial position, to be able to
advance our profession, we need to gain new members and sponsors. Sponsors
and members want to see benefit for their payments; sponsors want to be able
to reach more members; members want to have content and services. Content
and services requires effort, which can come from volunteers (members) or by
hire (finance).
If elected, I will work to balance our financial and volunteer resources to
help us overcome our three challenges and improve our community and
benefits.
I am currently working on a proposal that will have LOPSA fund the editorial
skills we need in order to help our volunteers generate productive content.
Currently, only one-third of our lopsa.org account holders and dues paying
members; I will work to convert the other two-thirds and ensure that our
members are benefiting from their dues. I will continue pushing to improve
our capabilities in hosting Sysadmin Days events and increasing their
profitability. And, I will continue our outreach to the broader community,
bringing increased visibility to the profession of system administration.
Biography
I have been running around Unix systems for over twenty years now. I was a
fulltime, hands-on systems administrator for over a decade both as an FTE
and as a contractor for companies such as Chrysler, Mobil, Lucent, Qwest,
and JP Morgan Chase. For the past two and half years, I have been the
Product Manager for Solaris technologies at JPMC, leading the corporate
strategy around Solaris. I hold a Masters of Business Administration from
Franklin University and have co-authored three books. In December of 2006,
my wife and I welcomed our third child (and first daughter), Sarah Elaina
into our lives.
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