The System Administrators Guild, Inc
NOVEMBER MEMO TO MEMBERS
Please Email board@lopsa.org with any questions, comments, or ideas.
We always want to hear from our constituency.
This email is being sent to the sage-members list. If you know of sysadmins or
SAGE members not on the list who would be interested in reading it, we encourage
you to forward it along.
In this memo:
- Status of the System Administrators Guild, Inc.
Greetings, Members of SAGE --
We are writing to you, our constituency, in a somewhat unusual format. We
hope you all have read the latest email from the President of Usenix,
Mike Jones. The Board of the System Administrators Guild was surprised
and saddened by the email and opinions of Mr. Jones. He seems to believe
that the negotiations are closed for good. The System Administrators
Guild believes the issues remaining in the agreement are both technical
and surmountable. We also believe the majority of the Usenix board agrees
with us, as more than one of the no voters has worked with us reasonably
and patiently after the vote to find an acceptable model for an agreement.
However, Mr. Jones' email also does us the favor of pointing out one
thing; we have successfully completed elections, and we are now an
independent entity. As such, we have a mandate from you, our
constituents, to be the society of our profession.
System administrators are a large, astonishingly diverse group of
individuals. Our skills and demands range from the strictly technical to
the psychological and economic. Some of us are managers, some of us are
operations staff, and some of us answer phones while planning budgets at
the same time. We are distinct from programmers, from toolsmiths and from
researchers. And so, we have our own unique demands for a professional
society and an education focused foundation.
Since the Usenix Board voted to dissolve SAGE in June 2004, both Usenix's
efforts and ours have been dedicated to creating that organization. We
have been pursuing any mechanism by which the promised benefits and
resources of the June 2004 motion can flow to the organization it mandated
and we created. We have worked on negotiating no fewer than three
agreements by which we can simply start our real jobs, serving system
administrators. We have also met every deadline imposed by Usenix motions
on us, as acknowledged by several Usenix Board votes. Just last week, we
delivered the status report outlined as part of "Step 3" of the June 2004
Usenix motion 12 days early; we did this despite Usenix having not
fulfilled any of the resource obligations in Step 2 of this motion, as Mr
Jones insisted to us on several occasions that the June 2004 motion was in
effect until negotiations were complete on a new agreement. Now,
apparently neither that report nor our request for a new agreement have
been well regarded.
Not one of us on the Board enjoys this brand of back and forth
negotiating. We do not understand why so many legal problems have only
been revealed at the last minute, when constructive work was impossible.
Nor do we understand why, in the opinion of the Usenix President, there is
no viable business model for a professional society of system
administrators, when far less numerous professions have active and
thriving societies. However, whatever the cause, our Board, and your
organization, has been in limbo for five months since you elected us.
Nearly one-fourth of our term has been consumed.
That has not been fair to us, nor has it been fair to you, our
constituency. No one has been serving the members of SAGE for well over a
year.
And that ends now.
We will pursue the reasonable alternatives proposed by members of the
Usenix board and hope still to conclude an equitable and mutually
beneficial agreement. However, we will no longer wait for it.
We will shortly be announcing our website, our new services, and calling
for volunteers who want to be part of our new future. We do not promise
early polish and glitter, and we do not promise everything at once. We do
promise that we will move quickly, accept failure when it happens, and
explore every possible avenue that serves our membership and our
profession.
We are also pleased to announce that Association Headquarters, our
management company, remains dedicated to our organization and our
profession despite the challenges of a brand new organization suddenly
bereft of promised support and resources. Their generosity, kind spirit
and optimism for our future are astonishing, and they have the deep
gratitude of a thankful Board.
They are on board for our future, and we are committed to making it
happen. We hope you join us for the next evolution in the System
Administrators Guild.
Visit us at http://www.lopsa.org. It's not much yet, but
there you will find future announcements from the System Administrators
Guild, sign up for membersips, and join our mailing lists:
announce@lopsa.org -- Organization announcements, no
discussion
discuss@systemadminstrators.org -- General membership discussion
This will ensure that your elected Board will always be able to reach you.
Furthermore, we have published on the main site of our webpage two
documents. The first is the November 18th Fact Finding report which we
delivered to the Usenix Board on October 5th, 2005. This details the
steps that our Board and the Interim Board took to fulfill our
obliagations under the June 2005 deadline.
http://lopsa.org/?q=node/66
The second document, the Step 3 Status Report, is the document we filed
with the Usenix Board on November 3, 2005 (15 days early), completing our
obligations under the original June 2004 Usenix Board motion. Thus far we
have recieved no official response from the Usenix Board on this report.
http://lopsa.org/?q=node/67
Thank you all for your patience and understanding. We hope it will soon be
rewarded, and we resolve to do our best to make it so. Taking this path was
not our first choice, nor even our tenth. However, if it is the path we must
take to create an effective, responsive and respresentative system adminstrators
professional society, then that is what we will do.
Sincerely,
The System Administrators Guild, Inc.
-- -- --
The System Administrators Guild, Inc is an independent, not for profit
New Jersey corporation, whose mission is to advance the practice of system
administration, to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its
practitioners, and to serve the public through education and outreach on
system administration issues. Contact us at
board@lopsa.org.
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