I was thinking about the great time that I had at LISA09 and PICC, and the thought occurred to me that I didn’t know about many sysadmin-related events. I mean, I hear about the big stuff, but there may very well be smaller events, or local events, that I (and most other people) don’t hear about. I think it’s because the information is disseminated in relatively closed circles, or via a publicly available webpage that relatively few people go to.

It made me wish that there was a public clearing house for sysadmin-related events, but I couldn’t find one, so I decided to do something about it.

I’m happy to introduce the SysAdmin Event Calendar. Essentially, it’s an embedded Google Calendar that I’ll be manually adding links to. I don’t expect that there are so many events that I’ll be overwhelmed (but that would be great, and I’d have to elicit help from you all for volunteers), but for now I’m going to take care of everything.

As you can see on that page (which you can also get to by clicking the “SysAdmin Calendar” link in the top bar on the Standalone Sysadmin site) that there are some ground rules I’ve laid down to prevent this from being a commercial marketing service. My interest is in getting system administrators together in person and meeting each other, and the rules are created with that in mind.

Please spread word of this calendar around. Since it’s hosted at Google, anyone can subscribe to the RSS feed or even to their own calendar with the ics file.

My eventual goal for this is to have enough entries and events that it becomes necessary to have multiple calendars, and separate them out geographically. I’d love to have the sysadmin community so active that I could say “oh, I’m going to be in Spokane next week, I wonder what’s going on in that area” and click the “Northwest USA” map. Things like that take time, but I’m patient, and I’m committed to helping do what I can to make sure that people can build their communities.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for the calendar, or if you think my rule set is too strict (or too lenient, I suppose). And please please please tell me about the sysadmin-related things going on in your world, because I want to put them on the calendar.