LOPSA News

The 2023 LOPSA Board Election is coming up in December. This year voting will open on December 1st and close on December 29th.

We are currently seeking candidates for this election. Any member can nominate a candidate, including themselves, provided the nominee meets the eligibility criteria.

To clarify, an "eligible member" is a non-student-level member who has kept their membership active and in good standing since the last Board election in December of last year.

If you or someone you know meets these criteria and is interested in running for a seat on the Board, we’d love to hear from you. Please send an email to board@lopsa.org by 6PM Pacific Time on November 28, 2023, to declare your intent to run.

This is the JSON provided to us by OpaVote after the close of our 2022 Board Election.

{ "n_seats": 1, "n_votes": 30, "title": "2022 Board Election", "precision": 6, "withdrawn": [], "method": "Meek STV", "version": "1.0", "candidates": [ "Jackson Smith" ], "winners": [ 0 ], "tie_breaks": [], "options": [ [ "prec", 6 ], [ "thresholdFormula", "Droop" ], [ "dynamicThreshold", "Dynamic" ], [ "fractionalThreshold", "Fractional" ], [ "weakTieBreakMethod", "Backward" ], [ "removeOvervotes", "Skip" ], [ "removeUndervotes", "Skip" ] ], "rounds": [ { "count": [ 30000000 ], "surplus": 14999999, "exhausted": 0, "continuing": [], "n": 1, "msg": "Count of first choices. Candidate Jackson Smith has reached the threshold and is elected. ", "winners": [ 0 ], "losers": [], "action": { "type": "first", "desc": "Count of first choices. " }, "thresh": 15000001 } ], "n_valid_votes": 30 }

Dear LOPSA community,

We are happy to announce the results of the 2022 LOPSA board election. Jackson Smith will continue to serve on the board for another term. He has been a valuable collaborator and helped to work through our backlog of board minutes as Secretary. We are excited to have him continue to contribute his positive energy to the board as we work towards our goals in 2023 and beyond.

We also want to express our gratitude to Anthony King for his service as a director. Although he did not run for re-election, we hope he will continue to be involved with LOPSA. He made a great impact during his time on the board, especially as chairperson of the Education Committee. He played a significant role in building momentum for the committee in 2022 and we hope to maintain that momentum in the future.

In the board meeting following the election, we elected board officers and appointed Committee Chairs. Here are the results:

Committee Chairs:

• Bylaws Committee - Matt Butch
• Marketing Committee - Drew Adams
• Technical Services Committee - Jackson Smith
• Local Chapters Committee - Aaron Haun
• Education Committee - Drew Adams + Jackson Smith (co-chair)

Board Officers:

• Secretary - Jackson Smith
• Treasurer - Matt Butch
• Vice President - Aaron Haun
• President - Drew Adams

We believe these appointments will provide strong leadership and direction for the organization and we look forward to working together to achieve our goals.

We would like to thank all members who participated in the election. Thank you for your continued support.

- Your LOPSA Board

The 2022 Board Election is now open for voting as of yesterday. Members should have already received an email from OpaVote, our voting platform. Please take a moment and cast your vote if you haven't done so already. The keen-eyed might notice that there is only one candidate this year. That is not an error. Nevertheless your participation and vote is still important us. Thank you.

Hey! I’m Jackson Smith, current board member and secretary of LOPSA, and I’m coming at you live from always sunny Philadelphia to announce my reelection bid. For those who don’t know me, I’ve been a systems administrator since 2015 and a LOPSA member since 2021 as part of the Leadership Committee. After some work trying to recruit board candidates, I ended up on the board myself.

As secretary of LOPSA, I’ve spent the past year helping revamp our bylaws and education programs behind the scenes. I also serve as our Technical Services chair and am working on rehoming LOPSA.org! I take the notes at our board meetings and have been migrating minutes from our wiki to Notion. I’ve managed to reduce the backlog on minutes since taking the helm as secretary.

LOPSA may have seen more active days in the past, but I’m working hard laying groundwork for a league of tomorrow. Systems administration has changed considerably since our foundation. While we’ve always worn many hats, the field is broader than ever. Demand for a professional organization for sysadmins remains high. I’m committed to expanding LOPSA and advancing the practice of systems administration into the future. My commitment to both education and outreach will soon be apparent, if it isn’t already, as our education program continues to gain momentum.

While I can’t promise immediate results or turnaround, I will continue the steady and unglamorous work needed to revitalize our organization if reelected.

The 2022 LOPSA Board Election is coming up in December. This year we plan to open voting on December 5th and close voting on December 30th. We are looking for candidates. A nomination for a candidate may be made by any eligible member either by nominating themselves or by nominating another eligible member. An "eligible member" is one who is a non-student-level member who's membership has remained in good standing since the last Board election (last December). So if you - or someone you know - is eligible and interested in running for a seat on the Board, be sure to send an email to board@lopsa.org by November 5th 2022 stating your intent to run.

This post is quoted from the original published here

On Sep. 1st the LOPSA Board was notified that on Aug. 26th an administrator's account was used to gain unauthorized access to our member management system. As soon as the vendor detected the suspicious activity, they deactivated the compromised credentials, therefore stopping further access. The credentials were used to initiate a phishing attack, sending approximately 13,000 emails posing as Netflix to non-LOPSA member recipients. At this time we believe this to be the extent of the malicious activity, and we are working with our vendor to determine the full scope. With the credentials compromised it's possible that the attacker had access to all information on each member's profile including:

•  Name
•  Address
•  Phone Number
•  Email
•  Job Title
•  Membership Renewal/Status History
• T-shirt Size

The attacker did not have access to password hashes or payment information.

We are currently working with the vendor to understand if any of our members' information was accessed and/or exported in any way.

Going forward we are looking into options to tighten security. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause.

If you have any questions, please reach out at board@lopsa.org

 - Your LOPSA Board

The 2021 LOPSA Board Election closed on December 31. We are pleased to say that we had one of the best turn outs of any recent election. Thank you to all eligible members who voted and made that happen!

We had four Board seats up for election and three incumbent candidates. We would like to congratulate the winners of the election:

• Aaron Haun

• Drew Adams

• Matt Butch

Our next Board Meeting on January 11th 2022 will be the change of the board. Andy Brown will be leaving the board for academic pursuits. We wish him the best in everything, and we thank him for his service to LOPSA over the years. He will be missed!

This leaves three board seats unoccupied. We have already started exploring options to fill those vacancies. We hope to have news regarding that soon.

Once again, thank you to all our wonderful members who took the time to lend their voice to this election.

Your LOPSA Board

We recently asked our membership to nominate candidates for the upcoming election on Dec. 31st, by tonight, Dec. 6th. While we did receive interest, there were no candidates outside of current board members that met the requirements in our current bylaws. In a board meeting tonight, we approved three incumbent candidates:

• Aaron Haun
• Drew Adams
• Matt Butch

We are exploring options for the consideration of non-qualifying candidates within the boundaries of our current bylaws.

Members who are eligible to vote will receive an email with voting instructions from OpaVote, the third party conducting polling for our election. These members will have from December 13th until December 31st to vote. 

During our regularly scheduled Board Meeting on Nov. 3rd 2021, we approved the changes that we solicited comments on in this post: LOPSA - Bylaw Amendment September 2021

This will simplify the process for submitting nominees for future elections. Keep an eye out for more information on our upcoming election soon.