I asked this in the other thread - what advocacy? For what? Against what? I've never seen LOPSA take a position on anything publicly.
Sent from my iPhone On May 15, 2014, at 2:57 PM, Matt Simmons <[email protected]> wrote: I need to be very clear that, although I am a LOPSA Board Member, I don't speak FOR the Board in this case. I'm on the Communications committee, but this is specifically from me, Matt Simmons, not LOPSA. The online organizer thread brought out a great set of responses from tons of people, and it's really terrific to see that people care so much, regardless of whether I agree completely with their viewpoints or not. One of the undercurrents of that thread is the topic of what LOPSA does, and as it happens, this is something that I've put some thought into, and I had some enlightenment on the topic, and I wanted to share it with you. This email's subject is a question I get asked again and again when I'm explaining it to people who aren't familiar with LOPSA. For a very long time, my answer was long, and it usually started with, "We do lots of things! Like..." and then I would dive into a bad description of some of the things that we have done, unless I was short on time, and then I'd say, "We're a group for system administrators", which doesn't actually tell anyone anything. I didn't have a good answer until recently. --- You might have seen that a couple of months ago, we released an org chart for LOPSA (https://lopsa.org/content/lopsa-organization-chart). I spent a lot of time on it, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I don't know if you have ever created an org chart from scratch before, but I hadn't. I found myself asking a lot of questions that I hadn't considered before. Things like, "should this box go here or there?" and, "what is the relationship between this program and that one?". Unless you're just arbitrarily putting boxes on the page, these are the kinds of questions you have to ask yourself while doing it, and I just hadn't done it before. Through that process, I came to realize exactly what it is that LOPSA does, and I realized that rather than the long, complicated answer that I'd always given, the reality is much simpler. LOPSA does two things: Philanthropy and Advocacy. Every program, committee, and effort that we have put forth in recent memory have served one or both of those two things. Whether it's Mentorship, the Locals program, or our LPR efforts, we're either helping people who need it or we're working to advocate for people who are (or will become) system administrators. I'm not saying that we're great at either of them yet, and I'm not saying that those two things are all we should ever do, but right now, that is what we actually do. And I think that's ok. I think if we start using those two words to describe ourselves, and to explain ourselves to others, that people will "grok" the organization much more quickly and much more naturally than they did before. I also think that, for the time being, since our resources and expertise are finite, it serves as a really good guide for what we should consider doing. Rather than dive into a new area we have no experience with, just because it's something cool that we need (and there are plenty of great ideas that I've heard that would be excellent to have completed), I think we should lean into what we're already doing, namely more philanthropy and advocacy. When we inevitably expand beyond those two, we should wait until we have a well-organized structure in place that we can draw from, and then we'll be attacking from a position of strength, rather than desperation. Always remember your Sun Tzu (http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html). Anyway, that's what I've got. I'm interested in your thoughts. Thanks for reading! --Matt -- LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? COOKIE MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
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