KWNPSA Past Events
- (Go to KWNPSA Upcoming Events)
- (See all KWNPSA Meeting Notes on one page))
Previous meetings of the Non-Profit System Administrators group:
Contents
- 1 Social Media
- 2 Estimating Time and Resources
- 3 Documenting Things
- 4 Regulatory Compliance
- 5 Promoting Open Source
- 6 Smooth Succession
- 7 Financial Software
- 8 The CLOUD
- 9 External Services and Consultants
- 10 Acquiring Hardware
- 11 What should we celebrate?
- 12 What should we fear?
- 13 Organizational Databases
- 14 Disaster Recovery
- 15 Collaborative editing tools
- 16 Out of band management
- 17 Data migration
- 18 Backups
- 19 All about VoIP
- 20 Keeping remote systems connected
- 21 Keeping computers up to date
- 22 Introductions and planning
Social Media
- Date
- Monday, 13 February 2017
- Event Announcement
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/237362708/
- Location
- Queen Street Commons Cafe, 43 Queen Street South, Kitchener.
- Across the street from our previous meeting place. Map
How can a Nonprofit organization make use of Social Media? Should a Nonprofit organization even use Social Media? What Social Media platform do you use? What sorts of things do you put on Social Media? Who puts it there? A team of SMEs? One person? Is this a full-time job? How much time does it take to maintain Social Media accounts for a Nonprofit organization? What will you do when your Social Media platform disappears? Or deletes your content? Or delivers your content to only a small set of viewers?
Estimating Time and Resources
- Date
- Monday, 16 January 2017
- Event Announcement
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/234260371/
- Meeting Notes
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/messages/boards/thread/50529155
In IT we are often asked to estimate the time and resources assorted tasks will take. Often these time/cost estimates are tied to funding, grants, and resource allocations. Unfortunately, many of us struggle at coming up with estimates more accurate than "it will take longer than expected". What are some strategies and best practices we can use to come up with better estimates? Under what circumstances does estimating things become easier? Harder? Under what conditions should we spend a lot of effort making estimates, and under what circumstances should we not?
When have you had good experiences making estimates? When have you struggled?
As always, bring your experiences and questions. Also, please spread the word about this meetup so that more people who do nonprofit systems administration will become aware of it.
Documenting Things
- Date
- Monday, 12 December 2016
- Event Announcement
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/234260323/
Much of our September meeting revolved around documentation. How do we ensure it gets written when there are so many other priorities? How is it maintained so it does not go out of date? How do we index it so that it is easy to find the information we need when we need it? What tools have we found most helpful in creating and maintaining documentation? What things are important to document, and what things can be skipped? As always, bring your experiences and questions.
Regulatory Compliance
- Date
- Monday, 14 November 2016
- Event Announcement
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/233388765/
Many non-profit organizations are involved in government-regulated services such as health care, employment acquisition and training. Other activities require adherence to other laws, such as building codes. How do you keep track of all the regulations that you need to follow? How do you store compliance documents such as sign-offs, NDAs, and contacts? What do you use for secure document storage and transmission? How do the SysAdmins get along with the Lawyers? When is encryption required? What do you encrypt and when?
Promoting Open Source
- Date
- Monday, 17 October 2016
- Event Announcement
- https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/233388573/
Many of us use Free and Open Source software (FLOSS) in our daily lives. But promoting the use of FLOSS within our organizations can be a challenge. What FLOSS does your organization use? How did this come to pass? What kinds of FLOSS is amenable to adoption by non-profit organizations? What is more challenging? What are some of the advantages/selling points you have found successful in promoting FLOSS in your organization? What have been been some of the disadvantages/challenges you have faced in promoting FLOSS?
As always, bring your experiences and questions. Let's use this group to support each other!
P.S. Did you know we post our meeting minutes? You can find them on the Meetup site here: https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/messages/boards/
Smooth Succession
- Date
- Monday, 19 September 2016
- Event Announcement
- http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/232556568/
Sooner or later, people move on. Sometimes they leave for greener pastures and sometimes they just leave. Sysadmins tend to have a lot knowledge about the systems they work with, and often their knowledge is in their heads and their heads alone. As responsible sysadmins, how do we transition out of our jobs without our organizations collapsing behind us? How do our replacements learn the institutional knowledge they need to keep things running? What best practices can we implement to document and share knowledge so that others know what is going on when we are hit by buses?
Financial Software
- Monday, 15 August 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/232234165/
What kinds of financial software are appropriate for nonprofits? What does your organization use? What work is involved in supporting it?
The CLOUD
- Monday, 11 July 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/228739922/
Every single meeting we mention "The Cloud" but it has never been a formal topic of discussion.
What do you trust on the cloud?
What do you not trust? Why?
How how the cloud made your life easier? How has it made it harder?
What criteria do you use when deciding to use cloud services?
Are there feasible alternatives to the cloud? What are their plusses and minuses?
Are IT admins who don't like the cloud dinosaurs who will be unemployed dinosaurs within a few months or years?
External Services and Consultants
- Monday, 13 June 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669505/
What sources do you provide in-house? What do you outsource and why? Office 365? Web services? Email? Phone services? Other things? What are the pros and cons of hosting these services internally versus getting somebody else to do them? What factors do you consider when outsourcing a service?
How do you deal with people providing external IT services to your organization? How do you interact with consultants and other external service providers effectively?
Acquiring Hardware
- Monday, 9 May 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669425/
Nonprofits tend to have different budget constraints than other organizations, and often different requirements. Let's talk about them.
What kinds of constraints do you deal with? What kinds of hardware do you purchase? How have those purchases changed with new technology (eg the Cloud?) Do you get equipment new? Used? Donated? What factors do you consider when getting new hardware? How long does hardware get used in your organization?
What should we celebrate?
- Monday, 11 April 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669161/
As a counterpoint to last month's terrifying meeting, let's discuss the ways that system administration has gotten easier and more effective. We can share tools and techniques that have made a big difference in our systems administration practices, and talk about our glorious utopian future.
What should we fear?
- Monday, 14 March 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669101/
Ransomware. Spear-phishing. Botnets. Dirty USB attacks. Protecting our users and data has always been scary, but things appear to be getting scarier. What threats do you worry about the most? How have you changed your approach to deal with them? What threats can we do something about? How do we deal with the threats that are beyond our control?
As always, we will be sharing experiences and stories.
Organizational Databases
- Monday, 8 February 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669340/
Many organizations have internal data that they want to track. What tools do we use to store this data? Hateful Microsoft Access? MySQL? A web framework like Django? Complicated, brittle spreadsheets? Some cloud solution?
How do we migrate data from insane database systems to better ones? How do we back them up? What are some best practices to dealing with internal databases? What kinds of databases have you dealt with, and what approaches have worked for you?
Disaster Recovery
- Monday, 11 January 2016
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/226669035/
Sometimes, disaster strikes: lightning, fire, floods or other traumas can wipe out our IT infrastructure. How can we protect against losing everything?
Have you put together disaster recovery plans? Have you conducted disaster recovery exercises? What things are most important to consider? What things are trickiest? What best practices have you learned? Bring your experiences and stories.
Collaborative editing tools
- Monday, 14 December 2015
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223909896/
how do people work together? How do you deal with privacy concerns? What tools work and what have problems?
- OneNote
- Etherpad and friends
- WebEx
Out of band management
- Monday, 9 November 2015
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223909851/
how do you manage servers when the servers are not directly accessible?
Data migration
- Monday, 19 October 2015
- Note: October 12 is Thanksgiving, so we are deferring the meeting for a week.
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223909871/
- Migrating mail servers (different versions of Exchange, GroupWise -> Exchange)
- Migrating Linux to Windows and vice versa
- Migrating MS Office to LibreOffice
Backups
- Monday, 21 September 2015
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223908420/
- How do you test your backups? Have you worked on disaster recovery?
- How do you synchronize backups across locations?
All about VoIP
- Monday, 17 August 2015
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223550824/
- What combination of VoIP and PSTN lines do you use?
- What problems does VoIP solve for you?
- What problems does it create?
Keeping remote systems connected
- Monday, 13 July 2015
- Event Announcement: http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/223189124/
- This month we will be talking about how to deal with multiple locations within an organization. We will be discussing things like file sharing setups for more than one location, communications between locations, different router types for VPN and such, etc....
- Multiple locations may mean more than one office building, or other situations like employees who work from home or other remote locations.
Keeping computers up to date
- Monday, 8 June 2015
Introductions and planning
- Monday, 11 May 2015
- (Go to KWNPSA Upcoming Events)
- (See all KWNPSA Meeting Notes on one page))
