Comments on: Making system administration social

By: War Games for Sysadmins « Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

War Games for Sysadmins « Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:56:06 +0000

[...] version of it to be worked on by a set of vetted, trusted freelancers. As I’ve said before, system administration is becoming more social, and over time it’s not unreasonable to think that ‘social’ would extend to on [...]

By: John Gannon

John Gannon — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:08:58 +0000

Joe — user groups are definitely a key source of knowledge exchange. Maybe there is a way to pull that information into this type of tool … some of these forums tend to have RSS feeds so many that’s a starting point (with some filtering applied).

By: John Gannon

John Gannon — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:07:50 +0000

Hi Kevin – good to hear from you. I hadn’t thought of IRC — you are right that its another channel to explore.

Re: it being a distraction, I agree, although one could argue that a sysadmin is plenty distracted already by flipping back and forth between their work apps and Twitter. Some folks I follow are Twittering all day while they are doing their IT jobs, so my thought was that if the activities were integrated it would increase overall productivity.

Re: semantic aspects, I’m wondering if you could leverage something like Zemanta’s API to knock out the blog part of the ‘quality content’ equation.

By: Yogesh Malik

Yogesh Malik — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:46:33 +0000

Great Article.I always liked the idea of having a plugin to integrate Twitter API and/or specific RSS feeds. However it still leaves a lot to imagination as how we are going to make it useful in a specific/customized environment?

By: Kevin Marshall

Kevin Marshall — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:13:44 +0000

It is an interesting idea, but I would lean towards saying that adding more social features to sys admin tools (or any ‘tools’ for that matter) tends to be a distraction.

In my experience, most sys admins use IRC for their ‘social’ needs related to their work…and search, blog posts, and articles to help them work through new problems they don’t really have experience with…so maybe there’s some room for making these parts of job a bit easier via social tools (but I think you’d have to go a lot further than where current plugins and tools are on the semantic front to deliver a level of quality content that was actually relevant and useful to someone like a sys admin)

By: Joe Junker

Joe Junker — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:37:03 +0000

Some excellent ideas here John. I see that User Groups have always been one of the most effective means for sysadmins to share “their secrets” – and you have some good ideas. Traditionally, it’s only been a matter of feeling that one’s advice will go on to make someone else’s job a bit easier, and the camaraderie that has helped this thrive to today. Some good ideas here.