The League of Professional System Administrators, LOPSA, is a non-profit organization aimed at advancing the profession of system administration. Like Server Fault, they want to see the knowledge and skill of system administrators expand. To this end, they do several important things which include local meetups and regional conferences. Also, both Server Fault and LOPSA are vendor neutral, we don’t care if you are a Cisco Network administrator or Linux administrator, we both want to see the field of system administration united.

So, why is this important to you? Server Fault has partnered with LOPSA to give 40 of our top users free memberships to LOPSA.

Both George and I have started to attend our local monthly meetings in New York (LOPSA-NYC) and Boston (Back Bay LISA). I asked George about how he felt about his LOPSA-NYC Meetings:

LOPSA-NYC, even though it is in it’s infancy, has been a great place for learning about methods and technologies I don’t get to interact with on a daily basis. That alone is a great thing, since – in my opinion – the goal of a sysadmin should be to learn about more than just the narrow set of technologies presented to them in their day job. A second, and some including me might argue a more important benefit out of going to the lopsa-nyc meetings is that I get to meet and talk to real people (err sysadmins, but close enough). The time after the talks is really where the advantage of LOPSA shines through, you get to talk to people that have seen the same issues as you, people who may have a new insight in a problem that you have been having that shines the light onto the solution.

LOPSA also puts on local conferences, out in Seattle they put on The Cascadia IT Conference. They also recently had PICC in New Jersey where both George and I gave a talk about Stack Exchange’s architecture.

Whether you call it DevOps, system administration, or system engineering our field is growing as a profession every day. Through the knowledge shared at conferences and local meetings like Cascadia and PICC, LOPSA’s mentor program, and Server Fault we constantly advancing, and these memberships are meant to be a part of that. We hope you are interested, and can take advantage of local chapters or decide to start your own. See this meta.serverfault.com question to put your name in for a membership — at the end of a week or two we will sort by reputation earned this calendar year, take the top 40, and pass your email address on to LOPSA for your membership.