May 2016 LOPSAgram: Community

1. President's Corner: Community

This month I would like to talk about community.  Over the last several months
I have mentioned the LOPSA community several times, but never really defined it
or what community means to me. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a
community has these definitions that apply to LOPSA:

1. "a group of people who live in the same area"
2. "a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattere through a larger society
   

LOPSA is a community of system admins through its locals (definition #1) and
through the common interests of its members (definition #2).  LOPSA has core of
around 450 paying members and another 200+ student members along with 5 - 8
active locals.

So what makes for a successful, healthy community?  Some of the characteristics
of successful communities are:

• A clear and realistic set of community goals.  LOPSA has a clear mission statement, but I feel that in the past has tried to do too much given our limited resources. We are changing that to focus on a more realistic set of goals going forward - professional development for existing system admins and helping new system administrators enter the field.
• A definable and sustainable set of reasons for your community to participate. LOPSA's member participation right now is limited.  We have a few members who work on the board, running locals and conferences, and giving talks; but many folks have chosen to not participate with their time.  On the plus side we have the core group of members who believe in LOPSA mission through their memberships, but on the downside we need to figure out ways to get more people involved to avoid burning out the members who are giving time.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.
• A solid and accessible set of community tools.  This has been a problem in the past, but I hope with the new website we have solved many of these issues.  We are still working to consolidate our social media accounts and improve our support of members who do give time to the community.  One way we plan to accomplish this is by hiring a part time staffer to help out.
• A staff who are supported and understand their role in the community. LOPSA needs to do a better job of recognizing and support its members who give time to the community.  We recognize people who give money as individual sponsors, but not people who give time. Please contact the board anytime you see a member giving time to the community so we can recognize them.
  
• A supportable economic model if the community needs to provide revenue to sustain itself.  This is difficult for all membership based communities as with all the options these days, most membership based communities are seeing their member numbers drop.  Many communities are evolving into conference communities (e.g.  https://www.usenix.org/blog/refocusing-lisa-community). The Board is very aware of this problem and looking at options for LOPSA. Please send any ideas, thoughts you may have to board@lopsa.org.
• Listen and be flexible - be ready to change should your community require it. LOPSA needs to evolve to survive and we need to hear from you on how you would like to see LOPSA evolve.
  

So please email board@lopsa.org with your ideas for how LOPSA can evolve to better support you, the system administrator.

2. LOPSA Board Elections - Candidate Slate & LOPSA Live

Your Leadership Committee (LC) has been hard at work preparing our candidates for the upcoming election. Incumbent Board Members John Boris and Matt Disney will not be running for re-election. 

For this election, we have five seats to be filled and six candidates running. Our candidate slate follows:

• Brian Globerman - Candidate Statement
  
• George Beech (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Scott Suehle - Candidate Statement
  
• Steven VanDevender (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Thomas Uphill (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Trevor Thorpe - Candidate Statement
  

The LC actively sought candidates who have management and leadership experience as well as who bring new skills and experience to the team. We hope that you are as pleased with our candidates as we are!

Please mark your calendars for our first LOPSA Live session on May 17 at 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST. We will hold a second session before the ballots open, watch for a later announcement.

The ballots will open on June 9.

3. Call for Volunteers: Conference Organizers & Assistants

4. William Bilancio Board Resignation

5. Member Tech Blog Highlight

6. Looking for Information on Sysadmin Education

The Education committee maintains the  Education and Training portion of the LOPSA Website.

https://lopsa.org/System-Admin-Colleges

If you know of a College/University that offers such a program send the information to educators@lopsa.org so we can add it to our list.

We are also building a new page that we hope can be built into a one stop place for you to find the latest information on conferences and local training events. Again if you know of any send the info to educators@lopsa.org and we will add it to the page.

7. LISA Conversations

Every month Lee Damon and Tom Limoncelli chat with a LISA conference presenter in LISA Conversations. In May they will be chatting with Clay Caviness & Edward Eigerman from Google about Managing Macs at Google Scale.

Are you responsible for making more than one computer work? Join us as we chat with Clay and Edward about how Google manages their fleet of Macs. This will not, by any means, be a Mac-centric conversation. Things done here will apply to any OS you might encounter in this kind of situation.

The conversation will be live at:

https://plus.google.com/events/cdiueoaaie266ejkv53jdtu818s

on Tuesday, 31 MAY at 3:30pm PDT, 6:30PM EDT.

Past LISA Conversations can be found at:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/lisa-conversations

8. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

Officer elections for SASAG will be held next at our June meeting on Thursday June 8. Watch our website for a speaker and talk topic announcement: https://sasag.org

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

CBUS: Columbus

9. Thank You To Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

Thanks to our individual sponsors:

Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
Gold: Ski Kacoroski
Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
Bronze: Gary Studwell
unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

10. Comments or suggestions?

As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org