Note from the President

by Hal Miller
<[email protected]>

Hal Miller is president of the SAGE STG Executive Committee.

A year and a half ago I ran a survey. While it was primarily aimed at the certification question, it had a number of other issues attached. The one that drew the most clear and positive response (overwhelming, in fact), was my "How-To Notes" series. We heard you, and it is now into production. Hal Pomeranz jumped right in and wrote the first one as a test case, and that has already graced the pages of this publication. A second one, by Adam Donahue on Apache, is in this issue.

After a series of negotiations (things move slowly in volunteer organizations), we now have an editor for the series. Melissa Binde will be shepherding, cajoling, recruiting, and chasing up as necessary to build this into a large, living collection. Her first effort (which we hope will be completed by the time this reaches your mailbox) will be to finalize the processes of the series and formats of the Notes. Next comes Web page production. She will then, if I know her as I think I do, come knocking on your virtual door looking for ideas and authors, so get your list of suggestions ready!

The other big winner in my survey was the question about involvement in the standards process. I can use some additional help on this one. Nick Stoughton represents USENIX and SAGE to the various standards bodies (and I can say from personal observation, he does it well). As to system-administration standards, though, the one area that sounded promising for our involvement did not pan out. There appears to be very little going on in sysadmin standardization. We could use some ideas on where to get involved. I'd like to see us select, if possible, some areas where we might have some positive impact and something solid to offer. Please email Nick <[email protected]> and/or me if you have any thoughts on this.

One reason we may not (yet) have the level of influence we may want in the standards process is our size. While forming the organization and defining the profession, we haven't worried much about our penetration of the potential membership market. We are ready now to begin a significant expansion. We've geared up by creating a vice president role to further split duties, creating a deputy executive director position that works much of the time on SAGE issues, etc. Now it's time to find the people who "ought" to be members. Certainly every one of us should put some effort into recruiting, but even if each of us brings two more, we still will have only a couple of percent of the sysadmin population. The USENIX marketing director is doing some additional publicity work. We need yet more and better ways to reach the target. We have begun working with vendors to put a SAGE brochure into the box when they ship a computer (figuring that it is a "sysadmin" who opens it). Other ideas are solicited. Send email to me.

SAGE is what all of us make it. Here are a couple of simple, quick things you can do, just by emailing ideas. I hope to hear from you!