2011 Candidate Statement: Nadine Miller

My name is Nadine Miller; those of you who frequent the LOPSA irc channel may only know me by my nick, “vraptor.” I’ve been involved as a member in various System Administration organizations since I turned onto branch my career path. In fact, my first position as a UNIX admin was as a direct result of attending BayLISA meetings in the 1990’s, so I am fully aware of the value of a strong system administration community.

As a freshman board member, I will immerse myself in learning as much about the current members, projects, and board members of LOPSA as I can, and will pitch in to work wherever my skills and aptitudes allow. In keeping with my belief that communication skills are integral to system administrator and organizational success, I will focus on the following areas:

  • Redoubling our recruiting efforts by expanding LOPSA’s communication channels. Marketing is an essential part of organization growth. We need to figure out where under served system administrators congregate and communicate our mission and goals to those unfamiliar with LOPSA or who perceive us to be solely focused on UNIX. Related to our recruiting efforts, communicating LOPSA’s value to employers should be included in our communication plan, as this will bring more credibility to our organization and our training and mentorship programs.
  • Identify and approach LOPSA members directly to advocate for their volunteer involvement in specific LOPSA activities where a members skills and interests match.
  • Bringing LOPSA’s combined knowledge base together to expand our visibility in the professional world.
    • LOPSA has made great strides in the last few years with the success of our small regional conferences thanks to many hard-working organizers, volunteers, presenters and trainers. We should analyze where we have members in other regions to determine if there is a business case, leadership, and volunteer support for adding conferences in other locations.
    • Several LOPSA members have authored training classes, written books, penned short topic publications for other organizations, published papers, and given presentations. Many other LOPSA members have the expertise to author, teach, and present, but need encouragement, assistance, and perhaps even a little prodding to put themselves out there and create. With the changes in publishing over the the last 5-7 years, electronic publishing of eBooks and print-on-demand are now a reality. We need to bring together these resources and leverage their potential to give LOPSA and our members additional revenue, increase our visibility in professional circles, and provide benefits for non-members as well.

I’d like to thank the leadership committee for inviting me to become a candidate for the LOPSA board, as well as all the LOPSA members I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with thus far in my involvement with LOPSA.

Please feel free to contact me on irc or at nnmiller+LOPSA@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss anything LOPSA or system administration related. You can also find me on Twitter @nnmiller.

My Short System Administrator Bio
I came to the system administration field later than many SAs. Though I had been involved in desktop support since the mid-80’s, my original career path was that of technical writing and technical training. I started my career as a UNIX admin in the mid-90’s. I’ve also held a number of leadership roles including manager of system and network administrators, team lead of several system administrator teams, and client liaison for on-site contractor teams. I attribute a great deal of my success as a system administrator to the communication skills I learned in my previous work.