My name is Derek Balling. If you haven't met me, I'm the co-author of the O'Reilly 'High Performance MySQL' book. You may have bumped into me at LISA, I've been attending since 2003, or you may have read previous posts of mine on the LOPSA lists.

A few years ago I achieved a personal goal by getting a job in a higher-ed environment. I now manage the systems administration team at Vassar College. This past fall, I got married to a very wonderful and understanding woman. All of this combines to mean that I'm in a very upbeat state of mind these days.

One of the Leadership Committee folks asked me about running for the Board. Since both my job and my wife are supportive, and I truly would like to help our organization grow, I figure its the best time to step up my LOPSA involvement.

I believe that our membership drive needs to continue to target segments of our population we're not adequately penetrating. We have achieved excellent traction in the "LISA Audience", but by definition this means that we've got a large percentage of people who work in big shops. We need to reach out to the average "one or two sysadmin" shops of the world as well. Their installs may not be as sexy, but they can certainly benefit from LOPSA membership just as well as anyone else can. I've worked in a huge IT-driven dot-com, and also been the first employee of a company that never had more than two sysadmins at a time. I like to think that my personal experiences represent a fairly decent cross-section of the types of organizations we need to try to reach out to in order to bolster our numbers.

I don't just mean our UNIX/Linux colleagues either. We need to redouble our efforts to attempt to encourage our Windows-centric brethren to join our ranks. Best practices are best practices regardless of which platform they are practiced on, and both camps can learn from the successes and failures of the other.

We need to continue to continue to improve our rate of volunteerism from within the ranks of LOPSA administrators. LOPSA is not the ACM, the IEEE, or any of those organizations that has huge budgets at their disposal, and tens of thousand of members. Our growth is going to be organic. It's going to be exposing our colleagues to the benefits of LOPSA membership.

Another topic that needs some careful consideration is that of benefits. I feel that there is a general question as to "Am I getting enough benefit to outweigh the cost of membership?", but I don't know that there is a real consensus for what those benefits *should be*. I think that instituting a regular series of polls (semi-annually? annually?) asking the membership "What's working for you?", "What's useless to you?" would give the Board of Directors an on-going pulse for how well it is doing in meeting its members' needs. We're not going to have a huge, wonderful, rich set of benefits in the first years, that's simply not realistic, but which benefits the Board chooses to tackle first will be key to LOPSA's growth.

I think that there is a growing need for something somewhat resembling certification, but that the traditional models for certification are not necessarily the most appropriate for our populace. System administrators, often not the product of a "formal education in system administration", are usually very dubious of certification standards. There have been certification attempts in the past by various entities, and they've met with varying levels of success both in terms of credibility and acceptance.

The biggest argument for certification is always "How else can I know that this guy knows what he's talking about?", with the counter-argument always going something like, "Can he think outside of the box enough to deal with anything but a standardized test?" Both of these positions are perfectly valid.

I have the kernel of an idea in the back of my head that I hope to try and flesh out with the help of the LOPSA membership's input. In my head, it works like a network of recommendations and ratings. The people you've worked with, the people you've known, the people you've seen give talks. Social networking may finally prove useful for something besides helping college kids find like-minded singles.

In the end, I feel that I bring to LOPSA the pragmatic view of the working system administrator. In this, the first election to actually bear the LOPSA name, it is vitally important to me that the voice of the small to medium sized organization be represented, and I would like to do that for you.

Thanks for your time.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | technorati