by I have enjoyed serving you for the past 2 years and would be honored to serve for 2 more years. Two years ago I said
“They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well it takes a community to create a good system admin. A community that provides training, mentoring and ethical guidance; career path resources such as job boards, certifications, and leadership opportunities; business resources such as insurance, legal, and advertising; advocating for its members with local and national governments; and face to face meetings to create a web of trust amoung its members. A community that benefits society by being the go to resource on system administration issues, certifying that its members have a basic level of competency, and creating a larger web of trust with other groups in society. I feel that LOPSA is that community. “
I feel that in the last two years, LOPSA has made great strides in becoming that community for system admins. LOPSA now has active chapters in the Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore/DC areas. The Seattle and New Jersey chapters run local, 2 day conferences for system admins (Cascadia and PICC). LOPSA is a sponsor of the Linuxfest Northwest conference, works with Usenix on the LISA conference, and provides tutorial instructors for the SCALE, PICC, and Cascadia conferences. LOPSA’s mentorship program successfully matches up system admins from around the world with experts who can help them on projects. LOPSA’s mail lists and chat rooms are great for meeting other system admins online for answers and consolation over the crazy things we must deal with on a daily basis. LOPSA is a becoming the community for system admins.
However LOPSA is not yet the defacto system admin community. While we are a growing organization with a bright future, we need to get larger in order to provide more benefits for our members and advocate our viewpoints with local and national governments. Over the last two years, LOPSA has laid the groundwork for this growth by moving to a new membership database, a new website, and bringing our costs down so we have a growing bank account. Our members have started several new chapters and the LOPSA name is showing up more and more on social networks such as Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook. I would like to continue to represent you over the next few years as LOPSA grows into *the* system admin community.
If re-elected I will continue to work to expand our membership, work with our sponsors to provide more benefits to our members, and the visiblity of LOPSA to the system admin community.
A little bit about me. I have worked as a system admin for 29 years (10 as a manager) and am a founding member of LOPSA. I have worked for large multinationals, small software firms, as the owner of a consulting business and currently am the senior system admin in a K-12 school district so I understand wide range of work environments where we work. I was president of the non-profit parent group at my kids school so I have a basic understanding of how a non-profit works. I currently coordinate speakers for the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild and am a field qualified team leader member of King County Search and Rescue (which amazingly has several parallels to system administration).
Please contact me at ski98033 on #lopsa, ski98033 on many IM services, or email at kacoroski@gmail.com with your questions, comments, or ideas. Thank you for your consideration.