From the SAGE President

Barbara Dijker is currently SAGE president. She's been sysadmining for about 12 years and runs a couple of ISPs.

A few years ago, the SAGE executive committee finally ratified formative documents. At the same time, we tried to address the idea of continuity and consistency in the SAGE executive committee by synchronizing terms and clearly (as one can predict future cases) outlining procedures for appointing officers and filling vacancies. Getting all this in writing has proven very useful. 1999 is the beginning of the first full elected term for the SAGE executive where the organizational documents have been in place.

While terms of SAGE executives are two years, SAGE officers are appointed by and within the executive committee for a term of one year. Normally, at mid-term, existing officers are simply reappointed. When someone decides to step down from an office, however, another officer is appointed.

Being on the SAGE executive committee represents a significant commitment. At the least, it involves meeting in person three to four times each year and participating in four to eight teleconferences between the in-person meetings. In addition, any project a SAGE executive takes on involves time delegating, coordinating, and ensuring follow-through. This is commonly referred to as "herding cats" — difficult indeed. Add to that the duties of particular offices. Since we're all system administrators who are notoriously overworked, and being on the SAGE executive committee is a volunteer extracurricular activity, paid work and family can take priority. The SAGE organizational documents provided a mechanism for executives to tender resignations and have those vacancies filled so that the work can continue.

Mid-term this year, we had one officer step down from office (but not from the executive committee) and two executives resign from their term. After significant deliberation, the end result is the following new SAGE executive committee: Barb Dijker (president), Xev Gittler (vice president), Peg Schafer (treasurer), David Parter (secretary), Geoff Halprin, Hal Miller, and Bruce Alan Wynn.

My job as president will be much easier for the prior work done by Hal Miller. This executive committee can and has hit the ground running. As with any such group, progress is a team effort. We're only as effective as the least of the group. With a full team on board again, we're able to move full steam ahead.

Looking forward, we have quite a few significant projects in the works. The most important things we can do for our membership fall under the broad category of building credibility for and continuing the definition of the profession of system administration. We are doing this through education and certification, building our own ranks, and increasing awareness in the general public.

The SAGE occupational analysis survey, which took place in October and November, generated over 1,000 responses. This information will form the basis of future education and certification efforts. John Sechrest chaired a productive workshop on education at LISA which has formed the basis for future collaboration in this area. SAGE has been working with Sun Microsystems, who are investing significant resources in system administration education with Sun Network Academy (SNAP) and their College Resource & Instructor Support Program (CRISP). Also in the education area, we have a unique opportunity to address computer science faculty at the CRA (cra.org) conference next summer. Dave Parter will be coordinating a session there to show CS faculty why they should and how to implement system administration courses in CS curricula.

SAGE currently has about 5,500 members. Membership could top 7,000 in the year 2000. Compare this to about 2,000 who attend the LISA conference each year and only seven years of existence. Growth in SAGE membership has been strong: 36% this past year. In addition, SAGE has been growing in number of local groups and international affiliates. Last year, Australia was the only international affiliate. This year groups in WISE (Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England), Portugal, and the Netherlands have started or are forming. A centralized Web site is being created to provide common information and links. We are also working on making SAGE more visible to system administrators by partnering with vendors to include SAGE flyers in their products.

Increasing awareness in the general public is a tough problem. This all can be broadly considered marketing. There are essentially four aspects of this activity: active promotion (advertising and press releases), passive promotion (media references to SAGE), vendor relations, and member pride. Interestingly, passive promotion is harder then active. SAGE is working on doing more promotion, both active and passive, than in the past. Recently, Dr. Dobb's Journal published an article on system administration careers that refers to SAGE. Small things like this can have a significant effect. We are also going to be working with appropriate parties to get SAGE to be the voice of our community for quoting in industry press. Vendors are tricky because they often (incorrectly) don't view system administrators as important targets. There are several reasons why this is changing, enough to be a separate article later. We hope to leverage this and establish valuable relationships.

There was a great deal of discussion about this topic at the SAGE community meeting at LISA. It was gratifying to finally hear the membership change from questions about why SAGE needs to exist and why are we doing this or that to questions about how can we make SAGE more visible to the rest of the world. This shift acknowledges that SAGE is moving in a positive direction and we need to flaunt it. We hope you wear your SAGE pin every day and your SAGE T-shirts frequently. We will be developing more and better ways to enable our thousands of members to help us in this effort.

So while there has been some "changing of the guard," we plan to not miss a beat. Momentum and energy within the organization are at what I see as an all-time high. Things set in motion many years ago are starting to click and fall into place. My job is to simply watch it happen and take all the credit. More seriously, this is a result of the concerted efforts of many individuals, many of whom are not on the executive committee and all of whom have other work of higher priority (like for pay). My job is really to make sure nothing falls in the cracks.