Re: more on professionalism

[Strata Rose Chalup <strata@virtual.net>]

I'm glad that folks are interested in this, and I hope it leads to 
a new surge of volunteers to get involved with the existing efforts.
My hope in posting the original message, as well as other materials, 
is to get people excited about contributing to BoK (body of knowledge)
and ethics.  

I don't necessarily think, as someone put it, that we've "put the cart
before the horse".  It's more like we've been concentrating so much
on the cart and horse that it's easy to lose sight of where it fits
in with the rest of the farm.  I just want to be clear on that point.
I'm one of those who are more resigned than happy about certification,
but I absolutely DON'T think that SAGE has been wasting its time and
resources in the way that's been proceeding.

I DO think there's a large number of folks out there who won't choose
to get involved with certification, but who would be happy to be a 
part of ethics or BoK work.  And that we need to provide a natural
focus point for those efforts to come together.  

Lee is already tirelessly doing a great job coordinating the ethics 
roundup, as well as being a major contributor.  But SAGE doesn't 
have a formal BoK track that I'm aware of right now.  There are some 
efforts taking place in the community, most notably Geoff Helprin's 
taxonomy and Rob Kolstad's LISA-workshop BoK matrix.  

With the Body of Knowledge matrix and the taxonomy work, both Geoff
and Rob have tried to start the ball rolling and include other 
interested parties.  I think that both the daunting scope of the
work and the high regard in which we tend to hold Geoff and Rob
have put most of us in the "I'd better wait until I have time to
study this before I try to contribute" mode.  And of course, time
is always our scarcest resource. 

I'd like to see SAGE provide some framework around which to center
the BoK efforts, but without imposing a huge amount of structure 
and workload in the manner of certification.  Certainly there would
need to be a formal process for publishing anything as "the SAGE
sysadmin BoK".  I think the most fruitful approach is likely to
be harvesting a BoK from a living body of peer-tested contributions,
rather than generating one from scratch in a committee somewhere.

There are a lot of innovative community-building tools out there,
ranging from advogato to wikis to the "am I hot or not" model of
rating postings.  I'd like to see SAGE hosting some of these tools
to do some of the BoK work, as well as get feedback on the ethics
and certification work.  It's somewhat ironic that, as an
organization of sysadmins, we have limited tools with which to 
interact as SAGE members.  

SAGE has done a great job organizing and collecting resources so 
far, and it's time to take that the next step forward.  That 
includes leveraging the talents of our members more and availing
ourselves of some of the great tools that have emerged over the
last several years.  Now we need to building a process and structure 
that lets us leverage tools with the reliability that we need but
without requiring that SAGE take on a large budgetary responsibility
to hire folks to deploy and maintain them.   The BayLISA Board is
just starting to do this, and we'll keep folks posted on how it
turns out.  :-)

Cheers,
_Strata

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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
 ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration **
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