Two questions for LOPSA Board Candidates

Tom Limoncelli has posted a pair of interesting questions on his blog, the same ones he asked the LOPSA Board candidates at one of the #lopsa-live sesssions last year. While I didn't get to answer them last year since I wasn't up for re-election, here is my take on them now.

Question 1:

I have been involved in several non-profits over the years, all of them being in some respect "community-based". Excluding LOPSA projects like migrating our membership mangement system and web site, I have many completed projects to my credit.

As one example, in my spare time I am one of the admins of a community supported site for former Cisco employees, employees.org. I have been involved in several projects over the years ranging from simple software deployments to server upgrades. In the case of one of the larger projects, I took over our stalled server migration and pushed it to completion; making sure that the OS was installed on the new system, ensuring that application owners had tested their apps on the new system, personally migrating all of our web content from the old Zope system to Drupal, and working with the rest of the admin team to ensure our tools were migrated and tested and that the migration was as smooth as possible for our user base.

In the case of the local community theatre where I am a former board member there have been many projects over the years. The most recent one was in my role as Master Carpenter where I had to ensure that the set was completed in time for load-in. Unlike software projects, this is a hard deadline as we must move out of the shop on a specific day and be up and running in the theatre for a tech rehearsal that evening. My role as the MC is primarily being responsible for building the set; but it also includes coordinating volunteers, communicating with the rest of the staff, and managing the load-in and strike process.

Question 2:

This one is tough. I say this not only because $10M is a lot of money to spend for a small organization, but because money is not really what LOPSA needs at this point in it's growth. What we really need is membership and active volunteers. We need more local groups that have a tighter tie to the central LOPSA organization (i.e. more local group members also being LOPSA members). We need to find a way to provide concrete value to being a member of LOPSA.

I think the best uses of a large sum of money would be to:

  • Hire a marketing firm to get the world out that LOPSA exists. I am always shocked by the number of SysAdmins I meet who have never heard of us. There are hundreds of thousands of SysAdmins, we just need to find out how to get our name in front of them and show them a value to membership.
  • Hire an office staff or contract to a management company for the day-to-day operations of the organization. We need to present a more professional face to our members and be able to respond to them in a more timely manner.
  • Invest in training for our members. Other organizations, such as ACM, have resources available to their members for on-line classes, publications and reference materials. While we can't do this within our current means we could with a large-enough influx of funds. This would be a great member benefit and would provide excellent value for our membership fee.
  • Invest a portion of the funds to provide on-going support for the above activities.

However, all the money in the world won't make LOPSA a better organization without a larger and more involved membership. Most of the things that LOPSA needs to fufill its mission do not need money, they need people. In order to become more active in education we need members in the education space who can work with universities to develop SysAdmin standards and curriculums. We can drive the best practices in SysAdmin without any additional funds, we only need to document the way we do our jobs and publish those documents where they are accessable to our peers. If we want to set standards for the SysAdmin industry we need to just start doing it — which again requires enough people interested in doing the job to get together and do it.

I have said this before to members I have met and in #lopsa-live sessions — if there is something you think that LOPSA should be doing, please let the Board know. However, don't be surprised if we ask you to be involved!