by Since you elected me last time around I have done a few things for LOPSA. I have served as Secretary Treasurer for the past 2 years. In that role I have managed the bank account and paid the bills. I have been involved in getting the Mentorship Program off the ground by briefly organizing the meetings of the Mentorship Program Team (MPT) until we could find a non-board member to take it on and I have continued to attend the weekly phone meetings of the MPT as the board liaison. I continue to serve on the Education committee. And there are lots of little things like designing the new website background, designing the LOPSA banners and getting them made, getting Mentorship fliers together and printed and manning the booth at a few conferences.
I still believe in LOPSA and I am still willing to commit my time and money to the cause. I want to see LOPSA succeed in a big way as it has a huge potential. It often feels like we are trying to herd cats but it is really worth the trouble.
For me this writing stuff is hard so rather than rehash all the stuff about me I wrote two years ago I am just using it again slightly updated:
I am not your average sysadmin–if there is such a thing. For one thing, there’s how I came to make this my career which I’ve been doing for 24 years. I have a masters degree in electrical engineering (UConn ’85) with a concentration in electro-magnetics and solid state physics and I studied antennas and fiber optics. But as it turned out I didn’t really like being engineer. I prefer to do things for people. It’s probably the mother (and grandmother) in me–which is another thing that maybe sets me apart a bit. It can certainly help to think of systems as errant children: patience is a virtue, and sometimes the most infuriating problem can have a very simple cause. Not to mention our job-object shares an important property of mother’s work: it’s never done.
Technically, as a sysadmin, I am a generalist, which is a good thing for an executive in this kind of organization to be. I have done a bit of everything: sendmail and postfx, backups in several flavors, building and installing packages…. I also like a bit of scripting here and there–leaning toward PERL and solving problems. Like a lot of smart techies I like variety and I hate to be bored.
On the organizational side, as many people in this community know I have some experience serving on related professional organizations and I know a lot of the history (good and bad) and players involved. I was Treasurer of USENIX for two years and I served as chair of the SAGE Certification Project (a good project though in the end the time wasn’t right). In the non-technical world, I have also not been afraid to step up when institutions I cared about needed people to do some of the heavy lifting–as for instance serving in various leadership roles in the Episcopal church on the local and the national level.
But more than any of those things I think I am a good candidate because I believe in LOPSA and I am ready to do what is needed to help LOPSA succeed. I believe there is a real need for system administrators to have a professional organization. I see a need for us as system administrators to be at hand to form the education and regulation of our profession. When I was working on the SAGE certification project I often said that I wanted to do it because if we didn’t do it… someone was going to do it TO us.
I see education of system administrators as the core of LOPSA’s calling. We not only need to share our knowledge but we need to take part in the future growth of our field.
Ultimately, though, for me it’s all about people and relationships and community. Some of my favorite people are deeply involved in LOPSA and I look forward to making more friends, getting to know those I don’t know yet, and help us all move our profession forward.
I look forward to having an opportunity to serve LOPSA for another term.