by For starters: I’m an Emacs mage (two more levels and I’m a wizard!) learning vi, and a Perl guru who mostly writes Python these days. That should tell you a lot about me right there.
In my time as a member of LOPSA, I’ve served on the Tech Team and the Education Committee, which gave me the opportunity to work with much of the current LOPSA leadership planning and executing conferences and other training opportunities. In addition to my planning work, I’ve taught and spoken on LDAP, spam, and documentation venues as diverse as Ohio Linux Fest, SCaLE, SysAdmin Days Philly, LISA, and LOPSA’s more recent events like the Cascadia IT Conference and the upcoming PICC ’11 (which you should attend, and not just to meet me and several of my fellow candidates in person).
I believe that LOPSA as an organization needs to continue to demonstrate in increasingly concrete ways the value we add to systems administration. When LOPSA was young, we told people at conferences that our goal was to be to systems administration what the AMA was to
doctors. I think that’s very much within our grasp, if we can work to articulate our value to new sysadmins (and to old sysadmins new to LOPSA). The current board has done a tremendous job at that task with a new round of wildly successful training events and conferences, a vibrant mentorship program, and more, and I want to continue that work.
I have sat at the LOPSA booth many days during LISA, OLF, and other events, and, with that experience under my belt, my goal is to make it easy — dreadfully easy — for future boothies to answer the most common question: “What do I get by joining LOPSA?”