[BBLISA] Cancel bblisa meeting for jan and announce offsite admin meeting

[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.