by So, I’m working on starting up a local group. North of San Francisco. Sonoma County and surrounding areas. First meeting is February 1st in Santa Rosa. “Sonoma County System Administrators”:http://SoCoSA.org/.
Lot of things to figure out when starting up a group. I’d helped do it before with a local linux users group that now has enough momentum that the original founders don’t have to do much.
Very important to do first: find a core group of people interested in making it happen. It’s almost impossible to do it yourself.
Finding a location can be difficult. I work for a state university. You might think with all the classrooms and whatnot on campus it’d be trivial to find space, but because of state law, they *must* charge for room use if it’s not directly related to the mission of the university. Luckily, one of the core people I mentioned before works at a local ISP that was willing to host us. O’Reilly’s offices were somewhat of a possibility, too.
Scheduling is reasonably easy. Find all the local “user” groups, consider that people might work in one town and live in another, and find a day that’s not taken. We also chose to avoid BayLISA’s regular date, even though they’re 100 miles from us, because they’re so very directly related.
Finding your members can hard, too. How do you find them? According to some documents I found on the state employment development department’s site, there’s 220 “Network/Systems Administrators” in our county as of 2002, and forecasted to be 340 in 2004. And those numbers are probably low, since a lot probably got a different job code, like some kind of “Analyst”. But where are they? I only know a couple dozen of them. Anybody got ideas where to find them? I know they’re out there somewhere!
Speakers: not hard to find a few to start with. And chances are most of your core group could put something halfway decent together with sufficient motivation. Just ask around. If a vendor is close enough to visit your workplace, they’re probably close enough to send somebody technical to talk about their product to a larger group of people; if the technology is cool, chances are somebody who’s worked on the technology will be excited enough about what they’re doing to speak even if their company doesn’t actively support the idea. We’re lucky enough to have sigje, the president of BayLISA offering to help us find speakers. Very key to keep good relationships with your speakers; this doesn’t seem hard to me, but apparently some groups get this wrong.
Speakers on an ongoing basis, however, can be hard. Sure, you found them easy for the first 6 months, but eventually you’ll have “picked all the low-hanging fruit”. Other than having some emergency topics ready, really putting a lot of effort into finding speakers, and finding somebody good at cold-calling potential speakers, I don’t have any good suggestions. Let me know if you have any ideas.
So, all that said, if you know any sysadmins in the general area of Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Novato, Rohnert Park, Sebastopol, Sonoma, Windsor or Healdsburg, let them know about our new group. And if you’re near enough to drive to us and have something interesting you’d like to talk to a group of sysadmins about, we definitely want to hear from you, too.