by I have been a member of LOPSA since the very beginning and have been proud to serve on the board of directors for the past two years. In that time we have seen the creation of the mentorship program, an updated web site, a new membership system, and cost cutting measures to bring us well within our means. We have also succeeded in growing the membership to over 700 members.
William Bilancio and I were the primary drivers of the conversion to the new web site and membership system, and this has taken the majority of my energies for the past year. While we have had a few growing pains with the new system, it is a platform that should provide us with opportunities for years of growth. Now that this is done we hope to continue adding features and fuctions to the site to further LOPSA’s mission and provide more services to our members.
During the past two years I have had the chance to meet many of our members in my time spent behind our tables at LISA and SCALE. This has strengthened my belief that LOPSA needs to work on building community amoung our members. Many of you are working in small organizations where you have little or no contact with other sysadmins. Whether it is through supportling local groups, sponsoring smaller conferences such as PICC and Cascadia, working with affliate groups, or providing training; LOPSA is well suited to fill that need!
There is another thing I have discovered in talking to people at conferences and in on-line forums – the vast majority of sysadmins do not know that LOPSA exists! I would like to see this change. We need to get the word out that whether you consider yourself a *nix sysadmin, a storage admin, a network admin, a dev op, or windows admin; LOPSA is there for you. I would like to champion this as one of the new board’s goals for 2011/2012.
I have over 20 years of experience as a sysadmin, in positions ranging from Unix sysadmin to webmaster to systems architect; and in companies both large and small. While I focus on systems and application monitoring these days, I still spend a significant portion of my time dealing with the day-to-day sysadmin task and duties. I feel that I have a good grasp of what is needed in a professional organization and would like to be part of defining how we can best do that for our members.
The new web site and goals that the board has set for LOPSA over the past year are just the beginning. LOPSA still has plenty of room to grow in its services to our members, and I would appreciate your support to allow me to be one of the people making that happen!
If you have questions or would like to chat, you can find me as drich on #lopsa or feel free to drop me an e-mail at drich@employees.org. I am always open to hearing what our members want from the organization. We are still young enough that your input could help to set the direction for LOPSA in the future!