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Local 202

From Bloomingpedia

The Local 202 was a closely knit group of computer and network system administrators from Bloomington. During its time, all the people in the group were from Kiva Networking, UITS, USSG, and Bluemarble. It was started December of 1998 by Chris Dent with the idea that system and network administrators in Bloomington needed a union-like collective so that we could help each other and provide a formidable force to demand better pay. It was never formally organized and ended up fading away in 2000 after Chris Dent left Kiva. The last post to the mailing list was on July 28th, 1999. It may have been the first attempt to organize a union for IT workers in Bloomington.

Most of the group's activities focused around discussing current sysadmin topics on a mailing list called local202@burningchrome.com which was hosted on Chris Dent's server burningchrome.com. There was a lot of random chat and tom foolery on the list, but there was also a lot of serious discussion. Over 600 messages were sent during the lifetime of the list. The list is no longer active.

Since the group was somewhat a secret, it was sometimes refered to by the code name of 11001010 (which is the number 202 in big-endian binary).

There was also a domain registered systhug.com that was mostly used by those working at Kiva, but I think we eventually planned on using it as the group's.

Meetings

There seems to have only been one official meeting. Lots of things where planned like officers and an FAQ.


People involved

This is a list of people who posted to the list at least once over the years. Not all of them were necessarily in the "circle". At one point, someone said "and then there were seven" refering to there only being 7 people really subscribed to the list. Later, there were more subscribers.