[Lopsa-regional-project] chp/partner/affiliate

[der.hans]

moin, moin,

Michael and I were discussing affiliate and needing LOPSA members.

It seemed to me we were talking about different things, so I see a need
for a different level.

Chapter: LOPSA sponsored system administration group. For now they'll be
regional, but maybe we end up with LOPSA-IBM, LOPSA-Cisco or LOPSA-NAS.
Heck, we might end up with a mix of the two: LOPSA-Google-SJ,
LOPSA-Google-PGH.

Partner: the organization has at least two LOPSA members and co-sponsors
one event with LOPSA every year.

Affiliate: at least one LOPSA member acts as a liaison to the group. The
relationship is mostly ad hoc co-promotion.

Does that make sense? Do we need another level?

I'd like us to start working on the affiliates. I hope many will turn into
partners, but we don't need to wait to get partnerships defined.

For affiliates LOPSA, in the near future, does NOT handle money, mailing
lists, web space, meeting space or tracking of $affiliate members.

For now, I would like LOPSA to help affiliates find speakers and promote
meetings.

I also want LOPSA to work on mechanisms for maintaining lists of
affiliates, reparsing affiliate schedules and redistributing events based
upon LOPSA specified categories.

Tasks:

1. create an affiliate definition and get it OKd by the board
2. decide what kinds of organizations we want to work with
3. each of us get an organization on board
4. get an affiliate directory up on the web site

I think the tasks can mostly be done in parallel although board buy in
is something we should get sooner than later.

Here are my initial suggestions for the tasks:

1. An affiliate is an organization with at least a tangental relation to
an area of interest to LOPSA. There shall be at least one LOPSA member
acting as a liaison between the affiliate and LOPSA. The affiliate does
not need to have any LOPSA members in its membership.

2. OS, application[0], and programming language[1] user and profession
groups.

3. I've already got one :)

4. I think the directory needs to be able to categorize the affiliates
at least based on region, human language, interest (linux, mac, perl,
etc.). It also needs to point at the group URL and the contact info for
the group.

For bonus points we find a way to take event feeds, mix them all together
and rebroadcast them with our own categorization, e.g. we can rebroadcast
Linux events in Phoenix or sysadm events in Boston on Thursdays.

For more bonus points we get a mechanism to automagically snarf group
contact info from the group's web site, so the group doesn't need to
contact us to give updates.

We can still keep working on Partner and Chapter definitions, but I'd like
us to start working with some organizations.

ciao,

der.hans

[0] probably want to stick with sysadm type applications for now
[1] does emacs count as all three? :)

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