Getting a NJ System Administrator conference up and running
I have been busy working on a project that has taken up a lot of my time in the past few weeks, the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2010.
Back at LISA ‘09 in Baltimore, I had a sit down with one of the other NJ System Administrators and we discussed what was the problem with the system administrators group that we belonged to an how to help fix it. The problem we saw that the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) had was getting there name out and getting new members. So out of this conversation over a few beers as well as pulling in another fellow NJ SA we came up with the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2010 (PICC ‘10) to be held in New Brunswick, NJ on May 7th and 8th.
We came back from Baltimore and jumped right in by finding a location and picking a date and forming the committee to work on getting the conference off the ground. We have gotten 2 sponsors so far, 10 trainers and training classes, 3 keynote speakers and are now working on getting the Invited Talks and submitted papers together.
The training classes range from how to write better documentation, how to better manage your time, disk virtualization, automation with Perl as well as a class on automation with Powershell, as well as IT Policy writing and the tools to move from being a junior system administer to a senior administrator and more.
The 3 keynotes we have scheduled are David N. Blank-Edelman on Friday night giving his "Through the Lens Geekly: How SysAdmins are Portrayed in Pop Culture?", Tom Limoncelli on Saturday morning and Eden Haber closing out the conference on Saturday afternoon with his “System Administrators in the Wild, What We’ve Learned from Watching You!” talk.
The conference schedule is made up of 8 Training class on Friday and 2 on Saturday. On Friday night will be the Conference Dinner and then the opening keynote followed by a movie. We haven’t gotten the movie figured out yet. Saturday will also have the invited talks and submitted papers as well as a room set up for unconference topics.
Saturday will start with another keynote and then followed by the papers, invited talks and unconference tracks. It’s shaping up to be a great conference. We are hoping to get at least 150 local system administrators to attend. If you are a NJ/PA/NY System Administrator and are interested then check out the website http://www.picconf.org and save the dates May 7th – 8th 2010. Oh yea registration for PICC ‘10 opened up yesterday so to register go here.