by I really appreciate the number of people who attended the first #lopsa-live candidate forum and apologize for not being able to make it. My answers to the questions are after the split…
Q. Could the candidates comment on how they’d encourage greater participation of women and minorities in system administration?
A. I would increase participation of women and minorities in two ways. First by outreach to educational institutions to let them know that there is a career in system administration that values what they do and how they perform. I have done this by giving talks at local junior high schools about my career in system administration. Second, I would see if we can partner more with other women and minority organizations. If you belong to one, I encourage you to ask them if they would like to partner with LOPSA.
Q. Could you expand on how you’d bring more members into LOPSA, women, minorities or no?
A. This is a question that the board has been struggling with for the last year. We have had the most success with running our own regional 2 conferences (I am co-chair of Cascadia 2012 in Seattle) and I think we should expand upon this concept as these conferences really fill a niche in training and community for System Admins. Beyond that, we really need to publicize LOPSA more as many folks do not know we exist. I have attended both SCALE and LinuxfestNW the last two years and ACPENW conference this year giving talks and telling people about LOPSA where the mentorship program and our regional conferences get the most interest.
Q. What is your geographical focus for recruitment, if any? ie. more localized groups or a more international membership?
A. I think we need to focus on creating more localized groups that can run regional conferences. Whether those groups are in the US or overseas makes no difference. As a board member over the last two years, I have learned how difficult it is to grow an organization where you do not have a high density of members in any one location. It is hard to have the high degree of interaction with the members. A local group, focused on local issues and running a local conference will be more successful than a dispersed global group.
Q. Where would you like LOPSA to focus its expenditures? Are there untapped sources of revenue we should be pursuing?
A. I feel that LOPSA needs to focus its expenditures on getting its name out by co-sponsoring as many conferences as it can, by running its own conferences, by encouraging social media posts with #lopsa, and by sponsoring blogs and instructors who will mention/link to LOPSA. In terms of revenue, I am working on getting some LOPSA wide (e.g. for all chapters and LOPSA conferences) sponsors who will help us out instead of having each conference and chapter approach the sponsors separately.
Q. I’m hearing a number of candidates say things that sound suspiciously like “there’s some magic marketing that will make everything better”. This sounds an awful lot like throwing things at the wall, and hoping that they’ll stick. Could you explain how and why you think that better/different marketing will improve anything?
A. I feel that in the past year, LOPSA has found a way to start marketing itself that works (local chapters, conferences, and conference sponsorships). This year when I attended LinuxfestNW a few people mentioned to me that they had heard of LOPSA and wanted to know more vs last year when no one knew of LOPSA. This is progress. I will be giving a talk to a local community college computer department soon about LOPSA. As far as I am concerned, there is no magic, just getting out name on more websites/blogs/social media posts along with attendance at computer events (e.g. ACPENW conference) where people who see LOPSA can ask more about it.
Q. One of the simultaneously good and bad things I observed at PICC this year was the variety of levels of expertise amongst the sysadmins there. While I do think that LOPSA should continue to grow and attempt to include admins of all levels, we likely don’t have the resources to expand everywhere simultaneously. How do you plan to address this issue?
A. I disagree with the statement that we cannot expand simultaneously for junior and senior system admins. The range of experience of LOPSA members is its strong point as it allows us to provide great mentors for the more junior members (e.g. the mentorship program) and provides more senior members help with very specific tasks (e.g. look at some of the questions answered on tech@lopsa.org). I am a big fan of the mentorship program as I have personally mentored several system admins over the years.
Q. Since before LOPSA was born, we’ve had the problem of too much work for the Board to do alone. We need to have members engaged in work for the org. Yet I’ve had feedback that “I volunteered but no one could tell me what needed to be done”. How would you attract, motivate and reward volunteers? If you had 20 volunteers tonight, what would you have them do? Could you show them a “career path” to LOPSA leadership?
A. Well I would love to hear who has provided that feedback as I think there are several projects we could have members help out on. A few off the top of my head are:
– make contact with other user groups across the nation and get the contact information of their main people (president, etc.) and see if we can post information to their mail lists.
– make contact with computer science department and clubs on college campuses and offer to provide speakers about LOPSA and see if they would like to become student chapters.
– make contact with media publications/sysadmin bloggers who are not part of lopsa and let them know about LOPSA and LOPSA events.
– find a friend to design a new LOPSA T-Shirt
I would motivate volunteers by letting everyone know about the great work the volunteer did on IRC and in the LOPSAgram.
Thanks for your questions and feel free to contact me at ski@lopsa.org with any additional questions or concerns.
cheers,
ski