SAGE Board Meeting Highlights

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SAGE Board Meeting Highlights

by Pat Parseghian, SAGE Secretary

SAGE's first elected board of directors met for the first time
on January 26, 1993 at the USENIX conference in San Diego.

Our first official act was to choose officers for the coming year:
Steve Simmons will serve as president, Peg Schafer as treasurer,
and Pat Parseghian as secretary. Elizabeth Zwicky holds the position of
past president. All board members were able to attend the meeting. In
addition to those mentioned above, the board includes Carol Kubicki,
Paul Moriarty, and Pat Wilson. Guests at the meeting included Paul
Evans and Bjorn Satdeva (from SAGE's interim board), Greg Rose
(SAGE-AU), Tom Christiansen, Ellie Young, and Cynthia Deno (USENIX).

Budget

The board reviewed the budget with Ellie Young. The 1993 budget
projects a deficit, even though membership is growing at a faster rate
than expected. A deficit is not unusual for a young organization,
and USENIX will cover the shortfall as necessary. Some expenses were
eliminated from the budget, thanks to our status as a USENIX STG, i.e.,
we do not need to incorporate or take out a separate liability insurance
policy to cover SAGE's directors. The cost of the services provided by
the USENIX office is a rough estimate that will be re-evaluated after
six months.

Publicity

We discussed several ways to increase SAGE's visibility, such as
articles in trade publications, mentions in system administration
courses and books, and having booths at related organizations'
conferences (e.g., UniForum, DECUS, Interop). Pat Wilson agreed to
head a committee, joined by Steve Simmons, Peg Schafer, and Bryan
McDonald (chairman of the Publications Working Group) to focus on this
issue. We agreed that our message should be that SAGE is ``strongly
rooted in UNIX"; although we'd like to reach out to all system
administrators, we don't want to spread ourselves too thin from the
start.

SANS II

The World Conference on Tools and Techniques for System Administration,
Networking, and Security will be held in Washington, D.C., April 18-23.
The conference is being run by FedUNIX, and cosponsored with USENIX and
SAGE.

Affiliated Groups

 The board voted to announce that we have affiliated with SAGE-AU
(Australia), and agreed that we should support other SAGE international
groups (as well as Local Technical Groups). Pat Parseghian volunteered
to be the contact for international groups. Greg Rose represented
SAGE-AU and noted that they will soon be actively recruiting members.
SAGE-AU would like to see SAGE begin addressing international issues.

The board thanked Bjorn Satdeva for his work on developing a document
describing SAGE Local Technical Groups (LTGs).

We agreed that the best approach might be to hand-craft the first few
LTGs that approach us, rather than to try to prepare an all-encompassing
document at the start.

Working Groups

It was agreed to develop a charter for the working groups, identify a
specific task for each group to accomplish, track its progress, and
determine whether a group should be dissolved. Carol Kubicki, Paul
Moriarty, Pat Parseghian, and Pat Wilson formed a subcommittee to
tackle these issues and review the working groups.

We accepted Dave England's offer to serve as chairperson of the
SAGE-vendors Working Group (after the original chairperson stepped
down). It was decided to restrict participation in the working groups
to SAGE members. This requirement will take effect at the Summer
USENIX conference, in order to make it easy for people to join.
Further, no new working groups would be designated until we have
drafted a document that describes how the working groups should operate.

SAGE Computer

Many SAGE functions are handled by USENIX on their computer system, and
some organizations have made cycles and disc space available to SAGE
for online archives.

We agreed that a separate computer for SAGE is not a pressing issue,
but one that we should carry forward so we can prepare a specification
to match our needs.

Job Placement

The SAGE board agreed that it should be a matter of policy for SAGE not
to be involved in job placement or individual recommendations. SAGE
board members are free to participate in such activities as long as it
is clear they are not acting in any official SAGE capacity.

Terms of Officers

There was a consensus that we expected to re-elect officers each year,
following the annual election for new board members. Paul Evans
reported that the ;login: article he wrote after the SAGE meeting in
San Antonio specifically mentioned that officers would serve one-year
terms.

Board Meeting Schedule

It was decided to meet at least three times per year at the Winter
and Summer USENIX conferences, and at the LISA conference. The next
meeting will be held as a conference call on March 5. 

SAGE Logo

We looked at some possible logos for SAGE, none of which seemed
suitable. A smaller group should collect some recommendations for
the rest of the board to consider. We agreed to ask the USENIX staff
for some assistance.

LISA VIII

The issue of putting together a committee to work with USENIX to
choose a chairperson for LISA VIII was tabled. The committee should
be formed at the SAGE board meeting in June.

Membership Survey

It was decided to postpone taking the time and expense to survey our
members at this time, and that we should consider doing so at some
future date (with the help of a professional). Since there were
concerns that we might not be doing what our members want, each board
member agreed to solicit comments from five members during the San
Diego conference. Carol Kubicki offered to collect and summarize these
comments.