I don’t think “giving up the rope” is a fair conclusion. This is an unfinished draft idea that the board is considering for future direction. I think it’s important for the current membership to provide some positive feedback about what we would like to see if the board were to take this idea and further refine it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should do it, but we should certainly help make the idea better. That takes a lot more effort and thought then immediately shooting it down.
For me, I’m intrigued by the idea of moving to a sponsorship model. As a small organization LOPSA can’t provide the same level of membership benefits as Usenix, ACM, or IEEE. Selling it as a membership based organization that has benefits is, and always has been, based on the promise of some sort of undefined future return. It’s a very hard sell. Relabelling membership as a sponsorship moves expectations more in line with the structure of an organization that has a working board. It frees the organization to focus on more projects — like the mentorship program — that are community oriented. As a potential sponsor, I want to financially support a LOPSA that does things that cultivate a diverse IT community of learning and collaboration. The mentorship program is a great success and a good reason to be a sponsor! (as a sponsor I hope a website redesign can feature and talk about about the people who are in the program and what they’re working on.) Similarly, I hope that as a sponsor that I can fund LOPSA to engage in sponsoring practical system administration research and electronic publication. For me that means reproducing the success of the mentorship program by creating a fellowship for more experienced system administrators with known in-depth domain knowledge. Perhaps those fellows can also speak to local groups through remote presentations. Particularly successful fellows — or other projects — could gain additional funding through LOPSA sponsored Kickstarter campaigns. A sponsorship structure — like I’m imaging through the examples above — helps the working board leverage more of their sysadmin day job work with the organization when they’re wearing their “LOPSA Hat”. This is the sort of thing I think of when we talk about members being sponsors. Sign me up. Gil > On Feb 9, 2015, at 5:23 PM, Derek J. Balling <[email protected]> wrote: > > Signed PGP part > Except that they're proposing giving up that rope, by no longer having > a membership-dues revenue stream. > > On 2/9/2015 8:13 PM, Craig Constantine wrote: > > This is a very good point. I'm very interested to see what 2015 > > brings for LOPSA now that the Board has some rope to run with. > > > > -- Craig Constantine, http://constantine.name > > > > > > On Feb 9, 2015, at 7:51 PM, Brandon Allbery <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > There are other benefits now, but in general LOPSA has been until > > very recently still recovering financially and operationally from > > the Late Unpleasantness involving USENIX. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ 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/ > > > > -- > I prefer to use encrypted mail. My public key fingerprint is FD6A 6990 > F035 DE9E 3713 B4F1 661B 3AD6 D82A BBD0. You can download it at > http://www.megacity.org/gpg_dballing.txt > > Learn how to encrypt your email with the E-Mail Self Defense Guide: > https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ > > _______________________________________________ > 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/ _______________________________________________ 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/
