How to Set Up a Local Group for System Administrators

by Elizabeth Zwicky

What is a local group, and why would you want one?
What do you need to get started?
Organizing a meeting
Other services
General advice
What SAGE can do for you

What is a local group, and why would you want one?

A local group is a set of system administrators in the same geographic area who meet regularly—usually monthly—to exchange information and socialize. Some local groups are quite formal, with membership fees and elections and printed newsletters; others are quite informal, consisting purely of a bunch of people who select a speaker every month. Different local groups also cover different amounts of space; there's one group for the entire state of New Jersey, and one for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Local groups are an effective way for system administrators in an area to share information. They provide a sense of community and contact year-round, bring in speakers that you might not get to hear otherwise, and provide that necessary chance to socialize with people who think jokes that have punchlines like "So he compressed vmunix" are funny.

There are now local groups in many parts of the United States, plus Australia and Canada, and everybody who's done it has found it worthwhile.

What do you need to get started?

If you are in Australia, you should contact SAGE-AU, which sponsors local groups there. Outside of Australia, things are less structured. This document tends to be most applicable to the United States, since that is where the authors have their experience, but the same basic procedures should hold in other countries.

In order to create a local group, you need 5–10 people in the same area who think it's a really great idea, and another 10–20 who'll come if you set it up for them. You will also need some space to meet in.

Looking through the most recent LISA conference attendee list is a good way to locate other people in your area who may be interested. To join the mailing list, send mail to "majordomo@usenix.org" with "subscribe sage-locals" in the body of the message. SAGE can also provide you with a list of SAGE members in your area, as long as you agree that you will only use the list for the purposes of forming a nonprofit group to benefit system administrators. (See the description of SAGE's support for local groups.)

Once you have a core group of people, you'll want to set up a mailing list for them, and then meet in person. In your first meetings of the core group, you'll need to do four important things: figure out where and when to meet, find a speaker for the first meeting, pick a name, and decide how the group is going to be structured. The first three have to be done almost immediately, while final decisions about structure can usually be put off for several months.

First, you'll need to find a space for the larger group to meet in. Your best bets are the employers of the core group. You need a space that's large enough to hold about twice as many people as you normally expect (later on, you'll have a better idea of exactly how big you'll get). The space should be consistently available, possible to schedule several months in advance, and reasonably accessible (for instance, open to foreign nationals and towards the center of the geographic area). Most groups meet in the same place on the same day every month. $groupname, in New Jersey, meets on the same day every month but moves around, in an attempt to make it fairer for their widely distributed membership. This works, and it makes it easy to avoid re-using a meeting space that turns out not to be suitable after all, but it requires a lot more effort for both the organizers and the membership at large. In general, you'll have to get space donated; places that allow you to rent meeting space generally require that you have liability insurance, which is expensive. The requirements for doing this vary widely depending on your location and your meeting plans, so each case needs to be discussed separately, but you can assume that doing this will require the guaranteed presence of at least one current SAGE member at each meeting.

Most groups meet in the evening, on weeknights, on the theory that people's employers won't like them using work time every month, and their families will want to do things with them on weekends. They tend to specify times like the first Wednesday of every month or the third Thursday. What day you pick will depend on what other groups schedule events in your area and when they schedule them, and probably on trivia like the schedules of the meeting organizer and the first building you find. When you pick a day, check out where it falls in every month for at least the next year, comparing against holidays of relevance to your membership. Most calendars are aggressively Christian—even when they include other holidays, they may not comprehend the concept of ones that start at sundown, and may therefore show Jewish and Muslim holidays as starting the day after the one that's relevant to evening meetings. Consult a human being, preferably one of your members, but, if not, a reference librarian at almost any library should be able to get you accurate information.

Second, you will need a topic for the first meeting. You want a topic of intense interest to local system administrators, although not necessarily one that's an immense draw. Your first meeting should appeal to your core audience; later you can worry about topics that will pull in 200 people, including random non-administrators. Since there will probably be a fair amount of chaos associated with the first meeting, your speaker should probably be one of the people associated with putting the group together, and not somebody who's going to be offended or unhappy if unexpected things happen.

Next, you will need a name. (You have to have a name in order to announce the meetings, create mailing lists, and so on.) There is no such thing as a temporary name. You should be prepared to put up with whatever name you pick forever. If you become a recognized SAGE local group, you may include SAGE in your name, which will give you some brand recognition right off the bat.

Finally, you'll need a structure for the group. You have a number of options for bylaws, including not having any. Some groups go the complete, formal route, with bylaws and board meetings and yearly elections, while some just take it as it comes. Whether or not people have bylaws is connected to whether or not they collect money (people generally won't give you money if you don't have bylaws). Having money can be extremely convenient (for instance, you can bring in speakers with it) but it involves a large amount of management. Some people believe that a formal structure with bylaws makes people less likely to just fade away when their lives get busy; other people believe that it imposes so much work that it makes people more likely to become burnt out.

One reasonable way to set up an elected board is to have an odd number of board members, elected for two-year terms, with approximately half the board elected each year (the first year starts with the larger "half" of the board having one-year terms), with the membership electing people to the board and the board selecting its own officers. You don't want the entire board to be replaced at the same time, because you need continuity. You don't want the membership at large to elect officers, because it either results in a complex voting scheme, or in good candidates not making it onto the board because they lost the race to be president. You don't want an even number of people unless there is a designated tie-breaker. 5, 7, and 9 are the only truly reasonable numbers; 3 is clearly too small, and 11 is clearly too big.

You have to form an initial board somehow, and determine who gets the short terms. You can either do this by mutual agreement, or by election (election is particularly handy if your initial group is larger than you want your final board to be). If you elect, the highest vote-getters should get the longest terms.

Organizing a meeting

Setting up any given meeting, once you've found a place to hold it, has three parts; finding a speaker, publicizing the meeting, and running the actual meeting.

You generally want to schedule speakers 3–6 months in advance. (Further out than that and they've forgotten by the time the event rolls around; closer in and they may not have time to rearrange their lives, make up slides, and buy airplane tickets.) In addition to the schedule, you should also have a list of people you know well who can be asked to fill in on short notice if one of the planned speakers cancels for some reason. If possible, you also want an absolute disaster plan, for how you're going to fill time if a speaker is horrifically late or fails to show on the day of the event. (When in doubt, start a discussion on a controversial subject or set up a horror story competition.) You'll need to brainstorm to fit the speakers you have available and the interests of your members. Check the Speakers Bureau list of topics for starters. Picking topics and sweet-talking speakers should be the number one priority of the group's organizers.

Other services

Many local groups have events besides regular, topic-oriented meetings. BayLISA has an annual picnic; $groupname has cluster group meetings, where even smaller groups get together for discussions of particular topics. Most local groups run mailing lists, which often become sources of information in their own right. T-shirts are also popular, and easy to do. Newsletters are popular with members, and provide you something to show other people, but very difficult to get out on a regular basis and relatively expensive.

General advice

People confuse easily; don't move meeting times or locations any more than absolutely necessary. You may get higher attendance by staying in a poor location than by switching locations often. This does not hold for groups that intentionally meet in a different place every time, but even they should be careful that the meeting day is consistent. Moving the meeting to avoid or meet in conjunction with another event usually reduces attendance at the moved meeting, and at the meeting after it.

Summer meetings always get lower attendance than the rest of the year, except for December (and November if you're too close to Thanksgiving). You may want to choose especially interesting topics for summer, to even out attendance. If you meet in late December, you are only going to get the most loyal attendees. BayLISA deals with this by making the December meeting a Christmas party.

It's vital to get notification out every time. A cron job is probably a good idea; if the information isn't updated correctly when you send it out, people will notify you, but if you don't send anything out they'll forget.

Avoid tieing your organization too closely to any one person. If you receive physical mail, use a post office box. If you have a bank account, more than one person should have signature authority. If you are going to provide mailing lists, Web services, and the like, register a domain for your organization and advertise hostnames in that domain, not the day-to-day hostnames of the machines providing the services. Yes, it's a nuisance, but not nearly as much of a nuisance as what happens if you give out the real names and then have to move services.

Most people are flattered to be asked to speak, and more than you might expect will come even if they have to pay their own way.

Pay attention to local events; sometimes you can draw in a speaker who is in town for another reason. If you advertise your meeting schedule (for instance, here on the SAGE Web), people who are in town for other reasons may contact you.

System administration audiences tend to be hostile to what they perceive as sales presentations. Vendors tend to send sales people to make presentations, because techie types tend to be less comfortable making presentations. It's unfair to speakers to bring them into a situation where the audience hates them. Make it clear to your speakers that you have a technical audience, and clear to your audience that you try to get technical speakers. If you have a topic that will clearly draw salespeople as speakers (for instance, "Large-Scale NFS" or "Commercial Backup Systems"), try having a panel with multiple vendors. This not only balances out the presentation, it also provides a clear demonstration to the vendors of what works well and what doesn't, as different vendors send different kinds of people.

While you don't want your board meeting to become a three-ring circus, you always need people who are not currently on the board but who participate. Invite a small number of interested parties to attend the board meetings, and possibly give them named responsibilities. People will burn out, and you will need people who know what's going on to replace them.

What SAGE can do for you

Please see the description of what SAGE offers as support for local groups. Take advantage of the freebies and the help.

For further suggestions, read Rick Moen's recommendations on how to start other kinds of groups.

If you have ideas for other services that SAGE should provide, please contact us).