by I’m on my way to my second LOPSA Board of Directors Face to Face meeting. The last time I was here, it was when I became a member of the board, and I really felt like a lot of my time at the meeting was spent trying to understand why LOPSA is the way that it is. Why do we have the structure that we have? Why do we have the problems that we have?
A lot of the past year of my board service has been spent trying to pay down the business equivalent of technical debt. Things that hadn’t been done for a long time, either because the knowledge how to do them was lost, or the knowledge that they should be done at all was lost.
A lot of it was really trying to get a solid grasp of what LOPSA is. At its core. That was part of the reason I put together the first org chart. While it’s not as complete as I’d like (or as fleshed out as it will be, I’m sure), I feel like it was a good first step toward seeing how the organization is put together and what the skeleton looks like right now.
My responsibilities this past year were mainly membership and communications. I tried to combine these roles to the extent I could, and communicate on a personal level with the membership, particularly when the joining and renewal processes were involved.
As a member, I never felt like there was a person on the other side of an email, so now, every time you join or renew, you get an email signed by me, with my email address so that you can reach out if you have a problem, and I try to personally answer each time something like that comes up.
One thing I haven’t figured out yet is LOPSA-Live. We haven’t had one in a while, mostly because the format we were using (IRC) is difficult, and a smaller number of our younger members use IRC the way that I always have. There’s got to be a good solution to the “distributed town-hall”, but I haven’t found it yet. I’ve considered a lot of solutions, though, and I’m still looking.
In terms of membership, we haven’t grown in membership nearly to the point that I would have liked. Part of that is communications, of course, and part of that is that LOPSA still lacks a compelling reason to join, and more to the point, it lacks a compelling story or narrative.
If you look at system administration today, what you actually see is that the title “system administrator” is shrinking, while the number of people who are performing system administration is increasing. There are more sysadmins right now than ever. It’s just that they don’t go by that title. They use the term “operations engineer”, or “analyst”, or one of dozens of other titles. And that’s fine, except we are an organization targeted at people who are system administrators, and not actively targeting people who do system administration. The difference is subtle but has large ramifications.
The active things that people are taking part in aren’t organizations, they’re movements. DevOps isn’t a club, it’s a force, a movement, and an improvement in the way of practicing for those people who have adopted it. LOPSA isn’t a movement, and for a very long time, it’s been a club. Is that the right thing? Is that how LOPSA can best serve the community?
Those questions are what I’ve been asking myself for a couple of months, now. What does LOPSA do? Why? Is there something that it should be doing instead? What are we here for? How can we make a difference? And importantly, how do we know if we’re doing it?
For as long as I’ve been involved with LOPSA, the primary metric and excuse has been “membership”. We needed to get more members so that we could get X, or we needed to get members so that we could do Y. But “membership” isn’t the only metric. In fact, after a year of being membership chair, I’m not even sure it should be considered the primary one.
How many lives does LOPSA touch? 60,000 people have visited the LOPSA webpage in the past year. We have helped over one hundred IT admins find experienced mentors. Since its inception, LOPSA has been responsible for teaching thousands of people skills in system administration, business, and programming.
Aren’t these things at least as valuable as how many people paid us $50 this year?
If LOPSA is going to be a worthwhile group, we need to establish what we want it to be for people and to do for people. Right now, it just is. What’s the value of bringing all of these terrific people together and then not doing anything with them?
We can do better, and that’s what I want to see come out of this Face to Face meeting. I want LOPSA to have a path, and to have some metrics that aren’t just membership, because there are more important things to do than make sure that people join our club.