by It has been a privilege to serve the system administration community over the past year as a member of the LOPSA Board of Directors. I hope you will grant me the opportunity to continue serving in that capacity.
I have been on a fascinating career journey, working in varied environments such as dot-coms, Fortune 500, higher education, and government research. I started as a student assistant system administrator, went on to be a professional UNIX/Linux admin, then I supervised sysadmins, and now I'm the group leader for cyber security operations at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I cut my sysadmin teeth on SunOS and Solaris and now work in a Linux world. And I actually have a masters degree in network and system administration. I have published papers and enjoy working in research. I went to my first USENIX conference in 1998, later started running BOFs and workshops at LISA every year, and have served on the LISA organizing committee. I have given classes on security or logging at SCALE, Cascadia, PICC, and LISA.
I have learned a tremendous amount about LOPSA operations this year. Some of my more material contributions include planning our presence at LISA and working on corporate sponsorships. I feel like I also proposed a few good ideas, suggested many more bad ones, and I appreciate all the community and board discussions along the way.
I feel that LOPSA is moving in the right direction, although we do face significant challenges.
Some of the great stuff we have seen over the last year:
- Much more confidence and certainty about LOPSA's financial standings.
- Continued growth of local affiliates.
- Continued success of the PICC and Cascadia conferences.
- Continued improvement in independent operational function.
- Great numbers on new memberships.
- Success of the mentorship program.
- Improved relations between LOPSA and USENIX.
Many people worked to accomplish all that. Thank you and congratulations to those of you involved.
This year, the board established and published a list of important priorities: https://lopsa.org/content/lopsa-board-project-priorities-2011-2012. Those are key but I also think we have some issues that are closer to home. I think these are some of the most serious challenges for LOPSA right now, and they are often interrelated with each other and/or the 2011-2012 board priorities:
- Identity. The identity of LOPSA is tied closely to our online communications forums (mainly IRC and email lists). We are struggling to transform our identity past that as those communication methods decline in popularity. We have to be careful here to not mess up the things that work well for us but also establish LOPSA clearly in other ways. This will, in turn, improve our diversity. We have to continue to push for publicity of LOPSA-related efforts (local affiliates, mentorship program, policy positions, etc).
- Member service. While our member service (e.g. responding to member requests, addressing membership problems, clearly communicating membership status) is not terrible, it could be better. The board has taken important steps to address this but we might be able to do more, such as re-evaluating the processes surrounding membership financial processing.
- Member retention. While we are gaining a lot of new members, we are not renewing enough members. We need to stabilize this trend, partly through improved communication but mainly by improving our value proposition.
- LOPSA value proposition and influence. We need to improve the perceived value that LOPSA offers to its members. One thing we can do here is to find more ways to support our local affiliates. As our rosters grow, we will be able to more easily accomplish this by being more influential, which I believe is what LOPSA is supposed to be and what our membership expects. As a result, our identity will expand in a healthy way.
- Volunteer coordination/effort. I believe there are lots of sysadmins that are willing to work to support our professional community and LOPSA itself. I hope we can do a better job of finding the right roles for people to get involved and stay involved. Perhaps a good way to align LOPSA volunteering with the busy lives everyone has is to find smaller, finite tasks rather than large and long-lived responsibilities. Easier said than done, though.
These are huge challenges for an organization that is really just a few years old. We continue to chip away at them.
My career has been facilitated by others who guided me along the way, including many in LOPSA. I am very grateful for that and feel it is both a responsibility and privilege to pay that generosity forward to the system administration community. Thank you for the part you play in LOPSA, large or small, and for your consideration.