Where are all the Sysadmins?

May 7, 2008 · 2 min read

I posted on

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_Hi all,

Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I get the distinct impression that sysadmins, for some reason, are not very community-oriented.

If you look online for developer communities, you find a fantastic amount of forums, websites, and blogging communities.

When I wanted to start blogging about my sysadmin adventures, I looked for communities similar to developer sites like geekswithblogs.net, Channel9, asp.net. However, I couldn't find any kind of hub that revolved around systems administration in a similar way.

We just seem a bit under-represented online, imo.

I want to find places I can converse and chat with fellow sysadmins, besides, obviously forums like these (which rock, btw).

For example, I did a search on Twitter and found a whole bunch of people that described themselves as sysadmins. Now those are exactly the kind of people I would like to follow on Twitter.

Similarly with Flickr, there are a number of small groups that deal with sysadmin and datacenter stuff, and I regularly contribute to those groups, but there are not many people there.

Another thing I would really love to see, is a good IRC community in this space. Again, perhaps there already is one that people here know of, I just haven't found it yet.

What constantly suprises me, is how, whenever I find some kind of sysadmin community "hub", the way collaboration is encouraged is incredibly old-school. For example mailing lists, or usenet groups. Now I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, but I hardly find anything in the web2.0 scene at all. Have a look on Facebook, how many large sysadmin groups do you find there for example? Twitter? Friendfeed? I would really love to have a few more sysadmins on Friendfeed! We appear to be under-represented online, and very fragmented.

So lets get connected! I will list some of the resources/communities I have found, I hope you will add your own. What I am trying to collect is a list of active community hubs. I will update this post with the links people add.

Forums: _

_Social Networks: _Flickr - Systems Administrators Pool Flickr - Rackmonkeys Pool

_Clubs/Organisations/Conferences _

_Podcasts/Vidcasts/Screencasts _

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I am secretly hoping the post will get stickied or something. Regardless, it gave me the idea to build it out more. I can add these links to my sysadmin blog. But it also reminded me I really need a Wiki or something, that would be even better.

Damnit, time to start migrated jemimus.net over to some proper hosting. Come to think of it, I need a new Wordpress theme too!

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This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Robert Kloosterhuis

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