I just got back from LISA, and as has happened for the last few years, I was pretty disappointed. I think the thing that sticks out the most is how isolated the community is. Maybe it’s because I’m used to hanging out with developers, entrepreneurs, and Web 2.0 types, who are always looking for the next cool thing, but sysadmins claim to be geeks, and any credible geek is doing the same thing.
Except not at LISA. Check a Twitter Search, for example — very few twitterers, almost none about the actual sessions, and no visibility within LISA of any twittering. Or blogging. This is the first conference I’ve gone to in ages that didn’t have a standard tag mentioned for blogging et al, which makes it hard to find blogs about a conference named ‘LISA’. Technorati finds 7 results, but most of those seem to be about a completely different conference.
It’s very frustrating, because it’s still one of the best conferences to go to as a sysadmin (although Velocity is quickly becoming better), but the attendees don’t seem to be pushing the conference, and the conference definitely isn’t pushing the attendees.
I’m once again friends with the guy running the conference, Adam Moskowitz, so hopefully I can pressure him into making it a bit more online somehow. I’m not sure there’s much he can do, though — he needs to somehow get the community interested, and one thing we’ve pretty clearly established is that we don’t have much of a community.
what a bummer. I used to be a frequent LISA attendee, but fell out of the habit in the 90's. I'd been thinking about getting back into it, but it just didn't seem worth the time or trouble. Maybe this is part of the reason why.
I've gotten good value out of the LISA Workshops, but I do get a similar sense from the Technical Sessions that you do. I also always have trouble with the cliqueishness of the conference, but that it probably natural when people have been going to it for 15 years. IRC was reasonably active during the conference, but I think that's more a sign of the stagnation than pushing the future.
I don't think it's that there's _no_ community, per se, it's that the nature of the community — because of the nature of most of the people in the community — is fairly conservative (in a non-political sense) and change-adverse. Sysadmins don't like change — and you should be the last person I should be telling that too… 8^)=
Yes, change is closely associated with pain. And paperwork.
While I agree that there is a semblance of a community, I disagree that sysadmins don't like change. I think the sysadmins who attend LISA don't like change, but I think there are plenty around who are always looking for an easier way to get to the pub earlier.
Which is kind of my point — what's so broken about the LISA community that it's inoculated itself against change, where the rest of the industry hasn't as much?
I skipped LISA this year, having attended 5 of the past 6 before that. LISA, especially the training sessions, still fills a void in the profession, but Velocity was in my mind a far superior value and a better mix of attendees, speakers, and content.
If Velocity 09 is as good as 08 I don't see myself at another LISA in the near future.
This i agree with.
LISA suffers from being in a world all its own. I asked about the twitter tags, and the conf people didn't know, so I went with LISA08, which seemed to be what most went with. They did have the @LISAConference but the content was a bit lacking.I think I found 2 others twittering. On a side note, at the RedHat summit, which did have a big tweet board, and twittered, only 3 people showed up for the tweetup. sad.
As for LISA, i am not sure if I will return. I encountered a lot of arrogance (feeds ignorance) about the whole new world thing. In the sense of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, this was definitely a Cathedral for a lot the long termers. (there are exceptions…)
That said, i did have some good side conversations and enjoined some of the talks a lot. It's too bad you have to wade through the 'dragon masters' to get to them.
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