sysadmin.ie

Dear friends,

The time has come; the System Administrators' Guild of Ireland is moving to a paid membership system. We've talked about this for some time, but we're ready and willing to take your money.

Why?

We started discussions about setting up a local SAGE chapter in 2000; people like Tanya Reilly, Karl Podesta and Adrian Colley were involved at the start. Eventually we started as a mailing list, with meeting venues provided mostly through the kind graces of Mike Norris and HEAnet. They very kindly put us up (and put up with us) while we were small, and we are very grateful to them. Several other organisations provided us with venues and speakers while we were growing, and we've listed them on our website.

However, we need to stand on our own feet now; this means occasionally having to hire our own venues. We also want to get speakers from outside Ireland (and Dublin!), and to cover at least some of their travel expenses. It's hard to do this with no income and no budget!

We are managing the migration through our new website, http://www.sysadmin.ie/; our web fiends, Sam Johnston and Andrew Barnes have given us a very shiny new home.

We have formed a company to manage the Guild and to reduce the personal liabilities of the Committee members. We would like to acknowledge the hard work put in by the team which worked on incorporation; Willie
O' Connor in particular put in a lot of hard work over the last two years.

Membership will be EUR50 per year, and will bring the following benefits;
- Access to the mailing list from May 2007 onwards
- Hosted Gmail account (first.last at sysadmin.ie) with 2 Gb of storage
- Free attendance at meetings
- Members-only content on www.sysadmin.ie

As an incitement to sign up early, and in recognition of your support over the years, all members who join before the end of March will receive a 20% discount for the first year (EUR40) and have the option of being listed as "Founding Members" on the website. We're working on a number of other benefits such as discounts from
providers whose products and services are of interest to sysadmins.

Students receive a 50% discount on membership, but will not have any voting rights at the AGM.

We are working on Corporate membership rates, and will announce them shortly.

If you are interested in joining, please drop by http://www.sysadmin.ie/ and sign up. We're accepting Paypal subscriptions at the moment, and hope to offer other payment methods in future. We also have an IRC channel on irc.sysadmin.ie; drop by #sysadmin-ie and say hello!

If you're not interested in joining under the new system, then we thank you for your interest and participation in the Guild; we couldn't have grown to our current size without you, and we hope to see you again in the future!

Thanks again for your ongoing support!

Donal Cunningham
Secretary of the System Administrators' Guild of Ireland