Thoughtful response (as usual) Matt…
You said:
"If there are 100,000 IT administrators on the internet active enough to ask
and answer a question on Server Fault, where are they? Do they know that LOPSA
exists and don't care or aren't interested or don't feel like we offer
anything? Or are they completely unaware of us? How do we find out the answer
to that question? How do you reach these thousands and thousands of people that
we are trying to represent?"
I keep thinking that LOPSA would do well to generate (or at least promulgate if
someone else generates) a BoK ("best practices") for the profession, along with
a certain amount of freely-available training (and maybe extending training
material for members.) This would give LOPSA a powerful reason for being, and
folks a good reason for joining (in order to get the extended training
materials, as well as the other benefits.) Then, once there is something worth
joining up for like this, then do some advertising on the relevant sysadmin-ny
sites. There will always be a certain amount of folks in the profession who
just don't care, to whom their job is just a day job to be done with as little
thinking effort as possible. Can't worry about attracting those people. But
maybe if LOPSA can be seen by IT management as a professional organization that
has a powerful methodology to improve IT results, then maybe managers would
become LOPSA advocates to their people in their org's, much like some of my
managers have recommended AMA courses, Dale Carnegie classes, etc. to staffs
I've been a part of.
About who would generate the BoK/training - there's already good books out
there on the DevOps front ("The Phoenix Project", "Continuous Delivery",
"Visible Ops Handbook", etc.) that LOPSA could put on a "recommended reading"
list, but I'm not sure what's already out there for the nitty-gritty stuff that
would take newb admins and train them up "the right way" (like what I think Ops
School is trying to work on.) Come to think of it though, I think every
sysadmin should get/read "The Practice of System and Network Administration" by
our own Tom Limoncelli et al, which I like to refer to as "the Bible of our
profession" (YMMV) - LOPSA should put that book on the reading list as well.
-Will
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