Date: Jan 01/06/12 3:05 PM Subject: [BBLISA-announce] Cancel bblisa meeting for jan and announce offsite admin meeting From: "John P. Rouillard" Hi all: Adam and I have been unable to round up a speaker for January, so I am officially cancelling the January BBLISA meeting on wednesday. However for those who would like to assist Adam, Steve, Patrick and I we are having an admin meeting, and in a throwback to bblisa admin meetings of the past we are including the standard tools of system admin: beer and pizza. The bblisa admin meeting will be at 7:30 on Wednesday 1/11/2012 at bertucci's in waltham ma: 475 Winter St. Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: 781-684-0650 We plan on having dinner around 6:30 and have the formal discussions occur around 7:30. PLEASE RSVP so we have some idea how many people will be coming for dinner and/or the meeting. For those who can't drive to the location, I can provide shuttle service to/from the the waverly square T stop (the end of bus route 73 out of harvard station). On the agenda so far are: One thing I forgot to mention for the January meeting do we want to do an organization meeting? Some topics to discuss and things to assign to people: How to get speakers Adam and I have done most of the heavy lifting on finding speakers. This leaves little time to do other things (write summaries, notices, establish a social media presence (whatever that means)). We would like to make that easier and spread it across more people. So: How do we develop speakers/identify people with interesting things to talk about? What support do we have for people to become first time speakers? What can we do to lower the risk of becoming a speaker. How to more effecively use our Usenix/SAGE and LOPSA affialitions both for promotion (which is a separate topic) but also to acquire leads on speakers How can we more effecively use our mailing list to get leads on speakers? How do we want to handle scheduling of talks? do we want to try to hit specific areas on a schedule? storage februaries ( zfs, iscsi ...) data safety april (backup systems, filesystem integrity checks tripwire ...) procedure management may ... etc. Would this drive interest and make people think about speaking. Location location location? Is it worth revisiting having a couple of talks a year in the 128 belt? How to get people to come see the speakers We average 8 or so people to see speakers. This is kind of embarrassing given the amount of work put in to arrage the room/speaker and for the speaker to develop the talk. Things to do for promotion: where does/should our twitter fit in. Who is responsible for care/feeding? facebook, linked in, google+ should we have a presence? What form should that take? announcements only? blog/news roll (if so who writes it, how do we prevent it causing more harm than good) who does care/feeding? Would doing a post talk summary be useful for each talk? Maybe publish in USENIX/Lopsa newsletter if they have them? What about outreach to the schools in the area? northeastern, harvard? (both as source of (student...) speakers and attendees). do we want to redesign the web site? If so how? I plan 1/2 hour per section max. Also does anybody have any contacts with Dan Walsh of Red Hat. One of the members mention that he had a good talk on SeLinux. Also there hve been a couple of requests for speakers on ZFS and Peter Galvin's name has come up a couple of times. Anybody interested in contacting him? Also I have had a few volunteers to speak on the following topics later in the year including: Bacula IPV6 Amazon EC2/S3 BackupPC Lean/ITIL that can use volunteer shepards. A couple of the talks may be dual speakers and I could use some help setting those up. If you have some ideas but are unable to attend or need a ride from waverly drop me an email and we can coordinate or I can bring up your idea for the admin group. -- -- rouilj John Rouillard =========================================================================== My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.