I’ve been thinking more and more about some of the issues that have been brough up and the barriers to creating a new organization. I don’t think I have any (complete) answers yet, but I have more things we can all think about. I think we’ve all mentioned some of these before, but in light of the recent issues, it may be time for them to re-surface. Some of this is pretty stream-of-conscious based.

One question that was brought up was what would differentiate us from anyone else. In a traditional profit-driven company, differentiation can be accomplished five different ways.

• product
• service
• personnel
• channel
• image/brand

Being that we are a not-for-profit, some of the classic meanings of these don’t map directly into what we are doing, but they can all be tweaked slightly to fit. Right now, I think we want to focus mostly on differentiating ourselves from USENIX in order to show the current SAGE members the value proposition of joining us as well, we can do a larger competitive analysis at a later date to determine whether we need to view groups like SANS as competitors, partners, or vendors.

Product

In our case, our product is the community we develop. This is our big chance to differentiate ourselves from USENIX, by offering products they have not been willing to offer in the past.

As Tom mentioned in his “rant”, USENIX focuses on a much different community that we want to. To use his definitions, they focus on the research and development communities, while we want to reach out to a broader community that includes engineering and operations. Tom theorizes that USENIX has been unable to successfully embrace the Windows communities (and to a lesser extent the networking, security, and web administration communities) because of their brand affinity with UNIX. While I certainly agree that is part of the issue, I also see that as a being a result of their focus on research and development communities. It is difficult to have too much of a research and development community around a technology where all R&D is handled by a single (or handful of) company. USENIX has been able to make some inroads with the other communities because there is more R&D happening in the open market.

Because our focus will be in the engineering and operations communities, we will be more able to reach out to these other communities and involve them. Our services and programs will be able to be much more focused on the pratical uses and implications of technologies and therefore of much greater value to a larger audience.

Service

Traditionally in differentiation, service means customer service. For us, there isn’t much we can do in the customer service arena, but we can modify the definition to mean the services that we offer. In some sense this is our customer service.

A large part of our building of community will consist of the services we offer. We need to carefully consider the communities we are targeting as we develop our service offerings. Most of the services USENIX offers/offered to SAGE were still focused on academic/R&D. Yes, that means much of our service will place us squarely in the 401(c)(6) territory, and I fully believe we should embrace that. There is still much we can do in the 401(c)(3) space, and we should have corporations with both designations, but our main focus for differentiation will need to be on 401(c)(6) issues.

Issues that have come up recently on the sage-members mailing list that we can be involved in, that we cannot be involved in now both because of being hampered by USENIX and because of a (c)(3) status:

• Group EO&/liability insurance
• Group medical/dental insurance
• Group legal insurance
• Business-building issues, information, and guidence
• Resume-building skills (not just the resume guidelines)
• I’m sure there were others

These are the kinds of services we can and should offer to our members. On top of that, we want to develop real virtual communities. Here are some services the web site should offer to help build those communities:

Forums and Mailing lists

Some people have always been unwilling to offer more than sage-members for a mailing list and lump everything together. And no one has ever seemed willing to set up an online forum system, I think dating back to the educational/R&D and “old timers” focus that USENIX has always had. We should create a number of mailing lists for various technologies and various other interests and gate them into forums. Maybe we can even develop a hierarchy of mailing lists such that if we had (for example) “aix”, “hpux”, “linux”, and “solaris” someone could subscribe to “unix” and get all of them or “operating-systems” and get them, plus “windows”, “zos”, and “os-390”. Maybe we could have “accounting”, “marketing”, and “legal-issues” which all rolled up to “independent-consulting” or “business-issues”.

Initial lists, gatewaying to be added later:

• announce – auto registration, closed posting
• discuss – any organization discussion
• consulting
• tech – technical discussion
• profession – workplace issues, career discussion

Blogs

Everyone blogs, but you have to go to a hundred and one different places to find everyone’s blogs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one stop?

Links and content aggregation

Similar to blogs, when I suddenly get handed an AIX issue, it’d be really nice to know that I can go to one place, the pre-eminent source for information and links on engineering and operating computers, to find the information I need. It would also be nice if this information was focused and practical. I have searched repeatedly to find information on comparing one model of server versus another for projects. This can also tie back to forums and mailing lists, it’d be nice if we could host the best mailing lists for technologies, such as veritas-users, sun-managers, etc. Need to determine what aggregation to have quickly.

Original content

I’d love to see information about capacity planning and comparison tables. I’d like to see information on TCOs. The pros and cons of automated build systems, and the effects they have. Market research data, such as the salary surveys, but also product/market numbers. Legal and compliance information.

Press releases, company information

I end up reading several sites a day looking for press releases about different companies and I know I miss some big ones.

Calendar of events

Not just our events, but major industry events. Sun’s NC05Q4 (which unfortunately, overlaps with LISA) should be listed. IBM’s techdays should be listed. Anything that could potentially be of interest and useful to a significant population of our community. Will require some form of moderation.

Feedback form/logbook

Capability for people to provide feedback about the site specifically… such as RSS feeds to add.

Skills profile

Individual users able to rate themselves on different categories.

Some other services that I can think of just off the top of my head:

• Product testing opportunities
• Obviously, discounts, but even better beta-test opportunities
• Workshops, local/regional events

Personnel

Like service, in traditional differentiation/positioning, personnel refers to the staff of a company; the engineers, the customer service representatives, even the executives. Again, I don’t think that really fits well for us, but what does fit well is our target market and membership. We have said before that we want to take a broad definition of system administration, to be inclusive of not just traditional SAs (and Unix ones at that mostly) but also web admins, net admins, mainframe admins, security admins, database admins, and any other admin you can think of. And, we want to focus not just on the upper eschelons, but we want the day-to-day admins, the up-and-coming admins, even the ones still in their educational careers. The SAGE members we’ll be bringing over already include some fairly luminous members, but we want to also try and attract members who are known outside of the Unix environment. The more well known names we can get that are outside of UNIX, the broader acceptance we can generate.

Channel

Channel gets into our “distribution”. So, for us, it will be mostly the web. As we grow, we will get into workshops, regional events, national conferences, a newsletter/magazine.

Initial documents needed

• Registration form with pay-later option.
• Organization’s production documents….
• mission statement
• sponsorships page
• sponsors page
• about us
• FAQ – How to pronounce LOPSA
• lobsa jokes… boston action…who ordered the lopsa?
• get advisory board to provide “What is SA” content

[to be continued]