A Chat With USENIX Community Manager Rikki Endsley (Video)

Rikki Endsley has been Community Manager for USENIX since September, 2011. She also edits their magazine, ;login:, writes for publications ranging from Linux.com to Network World, and is a long-distance runner to boot. But this interview concentrates on USENIX, a worthy organization that does a great job of helping its members (and the entire Unix/Linux community) stay up to date technically and, with its job board, keep USENIX members employed. Toward the end of the conversation, Rikki mentions some of the intangible but valuable benefits people get when they attend USENIX events. (Remember: If you don't have time to watch the video, can't see the video or just don't like video, you can click on the "Show/Hide Transcript" link and read a text version of the video.)

Comments

Re:Sort of past its sell date

[Saint Aardvark]

I respectfully disagree. I've been to four LISA conferences (sysadmin conference run by USENIX) since 2006, and I see very little that is comparable; there are the various LOPSA conferences (LOPSA-EAST, Cascadia IT Conference), but they're simply not at LISA's scale. Want to hang out with a thousand other sysadmins? Get training from Ted T'so on recovering borked disks? See what Google is up to -- or the small IT shop at the university down the coast with 1/20000th the budget? There's simply nothing else out there that matches it.

As for the rest of the conferences, all I know is the summaries I've read in ;login: and the material that I've watched/listened to on their website. (And btw, HUGE kudos to USENIX to opening access to their proceedings, talks and papers.) But at the very least, they make damned interesting reading, and have made me very curious about things that are going on outside my narrow focus.

I don't have the breadth of experience you do; I concentrate on system administration because I love it, and I've been doing it less than ten years. I'm definitely an interested amateur (at best) when it comes to topics like security, or file systems, or OS design. But I'm always surprised how much of USENIX conference material touches on areas of interest or direct relevance to me, and at the very least browsing their papers is a wonderful introduction to some research and work I'd miss otherwise. I'm sure (with the exception of LISA) there are more focused conferences, or better known ones (DefCon is one that springs to mind). But I can't agree that USENIX is "past its sell date".

(And in passing, thanks very kindly for all the work you've done for the Open Source/Free Software community. Kinda boggles my mind that I'm debating you...)

Interesting, learned something

[water-and-sewer]

Nothing but hate comments posted so far, as far as I can tell. I'm not a big fan of the Slashdot video articles, but this was better than most. And I learned something about Usenix, which is a bit more alive and dynamic than I'd thought. It's a tough time to be trying to build a community around paid membership and printed/epub journals though. The young generation wants free blogging articles and no membership fee. I wish them luck and might try subscribing to their journal, since I see they offer epub and I no longer care to collect and manage paper magazines/journals.

I'm a USENIX Blogger at LISA12

[Bandman]

I would suggest to anyone who thinks that USENIX conferences are solely for graybeards who walk around wearing suspenders, flipping nickels at people, then you should take a few minutes to read through the training program from LISA12. Not only is there the old standard Linux stuff, there are also great classes on building AWS infrastructures, cloudstack, PowerShell, and tons more. It's really pretty great.