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Last weekend we went to LinuxFest NorthWest 2008 in Bellingham, WA. It was a great time, we handed out a bunch of Tee-Shirts, met a lot of good people, and saw some interesting presentations. I even spoke with around half a dozen potential summer interns.
What was really interesting, however, was the response to LOPSA. We handed out a couple of dozen LOPSA fliers/stickers/other to mostly kids between 17 and 20. It was crystal clear that LOPSA needs to be marketing towards a younger crowd, and encouraging them. Except for a few LOPSA members who stopped by, nobody who grabbed LOPSA material had heard about it before. Reactions ranged from “That’s nice, not for me” to “Wow, I’m trying to figure out how to become a systems administrator and this is exactly what I need”.
All in all, we had about a dozen in-depth conversations about LOPSA (Luckily there were 4-5 of us to split the load), which branched off into mostly conversations about the business of systems administration. During these conversations, it not only became apparent that most people who haven’t worked in the industry have no clue what’s behind it, but that quite a few of us who have been in the industry for years have no interest or grasp of the business side of infrastructure.
Daniel and I spent a half hour explaining the politics and machinations of public peering and private peering on a whiteboard to two college students. We had countless conversations about the potential financial and employment benefits of an advocacy/professional network. We even spent some time helping a budding high-school programmer with an interest in systems administration debate the merits of a CS degree versus the merits of a Business Management degree.
Looking back over SAGE/Usenix events, our various technical journals, etc, I think we’re missing quite a bit. The first gap seems to be community outreach in the schools. If we’re not doing this already, we should be going into schools to nurture young minds, and explain to them the possibilities, including the responsibilities entailed, and the potential financial upsides.
The other apparent gap I realized over the weekend is the discussion of our profession as a profession, and not just as a place to do a lot of technical work. Everything from proposal writing, budgeting, and the finer points of our profession like understanding peering and evaluating infrastructure from a financial and business needs concerns seems to be glazed over for the sake of the technical details. Anybody can pickup a book on Postfix and set it up for their company. How many of us can explain why we would?
Anyways, check out my pictures, they’re spiffy. The after party for LinuxFest was held at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity. AMRE was awesome. The curator was a veritable encyclopedia of facts about radios and electricity, and an avid researcher of the great industrialists involved. Their static electricity hands-on lab was fun. They even have their own AM radio station, which was broadcasting War of the Worlds to all of their internal radios.