System administrators are users, too: Designing workspaces for managing Internet-scale systems

The people who run large-scale computer systems deserve the attention of the HCI community. These professionals work with increasingly diverse and complex hardware and software, large systems often characterized as "unknowable" by a single person. Relying on relatively crude tools, these professionals keep the technological world running. By improving the system administration work environment, the cost of computing and risk of downtime will be decreased while the deployment of complex, beneficial systems will increase.This one-day workshop will focus on the HCI problems of system administrators, specifically management of scale and diversity, problem solving, and system monitoring and notification. Our goal is to bring together (1) HCI researchers, (2) middleware user interface software developers, and (3) real-world system administrators to form a cross-disciplinary community around this topic.