First a bit of background
I’m Steve Murawski (in case you couldn’t tell from the URL ;) ). I’m running for one of the open seats on the LOPSA Board. If you haven’t heard of LOPSA, stay tuned - more on that in a minute.
I’ve led a circuitous route to becoming a sysadmin, but when I first became a sysadmin, LOPSA was there. LOPSA (and the Madison, Wisconsin chapter) were my first human introduction to sysadmins outside the handful that worked in capacities similar to mine.
I learned a bit more about LOPSA’s goals in those first years as a sysadmin, but honestly the biggest benefit to me was the discount on O’Reilly books (and even that had a hard time competing with Amazon’s regular pricing).
With the prodding of Matt Simmons, I began to get involved with LOPSA-East (PICC at the time) and Cascadia as an instructor, bringing some of my Windows experience to the training program. Teaching at those conferences has been a very rewarding experience and I love the community of attendees.
So what is LOPSA?
So why should I be on the board?
I’m not so sure I should be. I was asked to run and thought about it for quite some time. It’d be a lot easier to just go on with the teaching circuit and reap the benefits of a community that I tangentially participate in.
LOPSA professes to
- advance the practice of systems administration
- support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners
- serve the public through education and outreach on systems administration issues
I can’t promise to change the world or launch LOPSA to the forefront of the sysadmin community, but I do promise to approach each challenge the board is faced with through the lens of the key goals of LOPSA expressed above.
A few key thoughts
First, I’d like to raise awareness of LOPSA in the traditional Microsoft community. A number of the conferences and user groups I attend and speak at have never heard of LOPSA. Outside the mentoring program, I’ve had a hard time delivering a convincing case for membership.
Second, if LOPSA is positioned as the organization representing systems administrators, where was the content representing our take on Heartbleed? That was a bit of a news story, but outside a few member blogs, was there an official LOPSA statement?
If elected to the board, I’d like to see LOPSA, as an organization, take a position on newsworthy events and reach out to the media to share our position.