I am attempting to narrow down to one professional organization; however they all sound good, have similar benefits ...

So I was wondering if anyone has a founded preference? Some on who is a member of one of the organizations, epically if you are also an IT Pro as well. I would also like some form or reasoning behind your pick.


Thanks in advance,

What you really want to do is join your local group and find out what they do.

For example in Atlanta metro there is AUUG (Atlanta Unix Users Group) which is "affiliated" with Usenix but has no real membership requirements. Similarly there is ALE (Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts). I'm a "member" of both groups but not Sage, Usenix or the others you mention (I've only heard of Sage and Usenix - I thought Sage was a subset of Usenix).

Similarly when I was in NC I was in a local admin group there affiliated with Sage but again had no membership requirements itself.

I do put these local groups on my Resume/CV even though they don't provide membership cards.

If you're a professional system administrator you will probably get more mileage out of a UNIX users group than a LUG. The latter tend to be somewhat more informal given the number of hobbyists or users cum administrators who have other careers that are in them.

jlightner,

Thanks for the input, however I do not have a chance to go to a LUG, I speak English and the rest of Japan speeks Japanese. And the local computer enthusiast group on base hang out and play video games. Again thanks for the input.

--
-Bru

Right - my suggestion was to find a local UNIX user's group rather than a LUG. Typically you'll find the "professional" admins there and most UNIX shops are also doing Linux. Linux may not be the focus but you'll find a lot of discussion about Linux. At AUUG prior to the start of presentations we have "Guru sessions" where people ask questions or talk about things they're working on and a great deal of that discussion is Linux rather than UNIX.

Not having been to Japan I can't say what the professionals there do but it does seem much of the IT community around the world speaks English much as the business community does. It may be the local UNIX users group there has English offerings.

Are you a permanent resident of Japan? I'm curious why you wouldn't speak Japanese living there. I spent 5 weeks in India once without speaking Hindi (or the state language where I was) but:
a) English is one of the two national languages there so most of the people I had to interact with spoke it.
b) It was a fairly short assignment so I didn't see a need to learn the language especially given a).