USENIX 1.0
This is a post from Luke's old blog; it is saved here statically for historical purposes, as of October 2008
I got home from LISA on Friday night. It's always a bit of a strange conference for me -- on the one hand, it's great to be around so many smart people interested in system administration, but on the other hand, it's really frustrating to have such a large group of smart people not really moving forward.
It's a stupid metric, but as an example, there is exactly one post on Technorati tagged with lisa2007 (other than my own), and it's by a person whose nick is that tag. Mark Hinkle also blogged about it, but he didn't tag his post such that you'd find it on Technorati.
The upside of this fact is that I can speak as badly as I want about the conference and the organization without much fear of repercussion, but the downside is that, well, no one's really talking about either one other than while at the conference.
USENIX is pushing me to write a booklet about Puppet, but I've demurred so far because their audience is too small. If they want a larger audience, they need to get this conversation going more, they need to encourage blogging, and, possibly most importantly, they need to declare a common tag that everyone can and should use when talking about LISA. Just this little reminder would get people thinking about blogging.
Toward that end, I've emailed next year's chair, Mario Obejas, about specifying an explicit tag for LISA blogging, along with awards for best sysadmin blogger and best LISA blog post. Maybe he'll say yes, and maybe it'll make a difference.
