+1 Chase
I've been a member since 2007 and, in that time, I have yet to see this
organization consider taking a position on any interesting issues where
sysadmins are concerned. Time and time again, we shy away from anything
with an ethical implication in favor of inclusion, trying not to
alienate anyone.
I, personally, am an EFF member and happen to have strong opinions when
it comes to certain subjects (privacy, net neutrality, etc) and
obviously I don't expect an organization like LOPSA to take those sorts
of stances on certain subjects, but I do think that taking no stances on
any events weakens the value-add proposition for potential members.
I, myself, am the only LOPSA member at my place of work, and I have
difficult time coming up with good reasons to encourage membership among
others there.
~Paul
On 05/15/2014 04:18 PM, Chase Hoffman wrote:
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] <mailto:[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.
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