I had a great – albeit brief – conversation with Matt Simmons while he was in town on his world tour in NYC recently that got me thinking about bringing the SysAdmin community together. This isn’t the first time that I’ve thought about how bring the SysAdmin community together in a stronger way. And, since I’ve joined Stack Exchange I’ve thought about it more and more since community building is a big part of what we do here.
The working theories are that there are a large portion of our community in the small business sector – places like regional ISPs that have a large need for administrators, but aren’t that big in the grand scheme of things. But it _seems_ that a good deal of system administrators aren’t involved in the community at all – or at least not in a visible way. There are a few questions that come to mind when you start to think about how to grow and solidify a community:
* How do I reach these people
* How do I get them involved
The problem I’m having now, is simply I don’t really have any ideas on how to accomplish these goals, how to reach out and bring people into the wonderful community that is being built.
I shall keep mulling this over, but if you have any ideas – leave them in the comments below.
community.spiceworks.com – Techcrunch described it as “the Facebook of IT”.
I am a Sr. Sys Admin for a SMB company and another colleague and I were having the same discussion regarding creating a Sys Admin community site to share knowledge.
There are some out there, but your looking at “something” Overflow or Spiceworks or TechNet. Those are good for fixing problems, but there are truly nothing out there that has a “community” driven aspect.
Please email me as I would love to hear more about your views and ideas on this topic.
Try to get hold of LOPSA, they have similar goals.
There is a very strong strain of solitary out there in sysadmin-space. The admins I worked with at my old job were a hermetic bunch. They had their own corner of sysadmin-space staked out, and would help people if asked to help, but didn’t let people know they were willing to help people.
I suspect this had to do with their being Windows admins, as that culture involves less “if it’s broke, write something to fix it” mentality than the Linux space. And fewer mailing-lists & IRC channels, which are sometimes the only place to find some information in Linux-land.
And on the Linux side, I knew several rather smart people who were dead convinced that what they knew wasn’t worth sharing. So they didn’t. It takes some ego to go forth into the world believe you have something worth sharing.