Voice of the DBA

Tag: PASS

  • The Wiffle-Waffle, or Why I’m Running for the PASS Board of Directors

    I’ll announce it here first, along with some reasons why I’m waffling from an earlier post:

    I’m going to run for the PASS Board of Directors in 2010.

    I am finalizing my application and getting reference letters before I send it to the Nominating Committee.

    Why

    I’ve always admired my wife for her passion with horses. If she could quit her job tomorrow and train horses (and their riders) full-time she would. She dreams about getting there, and spends as much time as she can with the big beasts. I support that effort, sometimes with a shovel, and hope she gets there some day.

    However I haven’t felt any great passion in the past. When I was 35, my wife and I talked about retiring for 6 months when we each reached 40. When I sold SQLServerCentral, she asked me if I wanted to still try retirement. I declined since I didn’t have anything I really wanted to do. No great passion drove me. I enjoy hobbies, and I enjoy life, but nothing seemed to really move me enough to want to do it full-time.

    I was wrong.

    Without realizing it, something had crept up on me. Recently my wife and I were discussing whether I should run for the PASS board, and she was asking my reasons for doing so. What would I gain? Does it help my brand? What can I do? Why bother? As I tried to give her answers, I let my mind randomly wander across the last decade and my involvement with PASS. The things I’ve enjoyed at the Summit. The numerous times I’ve been ready to throw my hands in the air and completely divorce myself from PASS. The way that I’ve tried to influence and push PASS in ways that would benefit the community. When I finished talking to her, she told me this.

    “It’s a no brainer. Run”

    She told me that I had displayed a passion that she hadn’t seen before either. A real drive to make a difference that shone through in my words. She had concerns over the time commitment, but she did think we could manage that this was important.

    I slept on our conversation and then made the decision to move forward the next day.

    If my application is approved, it will be posted on the PASS site, but if not, I’ll post it here so you can judge for yourself if I am someone that is a good candidate for the PASS board of directors.

    I am both excited, and a little nervous, about the this process moving forward. I look forward to meeting a few of you on the campaign, err, SQL Saturday trail.

  • Rating PASS Abstracts

    I was on a committee to help rate abstracts for the PASS Summit this year. It was an interesting and challenging experience. I learned some things, and I can better appreciate that this is a tough job. It’s hard to try and choose what people want, what will interest people, and what makes the Summit a better sell to potential attendees. Or at least their managers.

    I found some flaws in the process, at least things that I thought made it a difficult set of decisions for me. I wanted to list them out, not to blame anyone, but to give some insight into the process, and perhaps get some ideas on how to better serve the community in the future.

    Here’s the basic process:

    • People submit abstracts. This year they could see what else was submitted prior to their entry. I believe they could edit theirs, but not sure.
    • All abstracts were put in an XLS and sent to committee members.
    • We had a tool on the PASS site which allowed us to rate each abstract in four areas. Ratings were 1-10, and were in these areas: Abstract, topic, speaker, subjective.
    • Once all sessions in our area were rated, the committee scheduled a call to review the overall rating.
    • We picked a certain number of sessions in various tracks along with alternates.
    • People get notified.

    A quick list of the issues I saw, and I’ll give some more detailed thoughts on each one of these. However I’m curious about any feedback as well from other people that are interested.

    • My first issue was that I didn’t really have a set of guidelines for what each rating meant. What is abstract v topic v subjective? Speaker I could figure out, but what do you do if you don’t know the speaker or haven’t seen them talk? We actually had people rating this differently
    • I find it difficult to actually rate things on a 1-10 scale. What’s a 7 v 8 v 9? I found myself struggling and probably inconsistently rated things. I might give someone an 8 in one area, and then find a very similar item and give it a 7. This is a hard one
    • I didn’t have much feedback on how other people in the community felt about speakers.
    • I didn’t have much feedback on how other people in the community felt about topics, or these specific sessions.
    • It was hard to tell if we were covering all types of topics in SQL Server. I only saw one replication submission in the spotlight sessions. No idea if there were any in the regular sessions.
    • I had no insight into what other groups were doing for their tracks. For all I know we all picked SSIS ETL sessions and everyone left out fuzzy matching or data mining.
    • I have no idea what speakers submitted in other tracks or areas.

    Some of these worked themselves out, so they aren’t major complaints. As an example, we discussed our ratings, and didn’t necessarily pick the top xx in some area. We moved around, and sometimes picked sessions rated much lower.

    As I mentioned, I’ll post some notes on each of these areas in more detail, assuming I can disclose things. Please feel free to comment on what you think we should do to pick sessions of more value to everyone.

  • PASS, Don’t Waste My Time

    Update: Apparently I can’t write, or get a point across from the comments and a few emails, so I have edited this to hopefully make it clearer.

    The pre/post conference sessions came out today for the 2010 SQL PASS Summit. And to my surprise the list of sessions wasn’t quite what I expected.
    I know I complained last year about the selections, and a few people said that I should get involved if I didn’t like the way things were done. So I did. I volunteered and wound up on the Pre/Post Con and Spotlight committee. I spent quite a few hours of my time reviewing abstracts, emailing with the speakers to get more information, and then rating sessions. I got on a conference call, with all that prep work, and debated the choices with the others and think we had a great list of sessions. We, the three members of the committee, sent our decisions over to PASS over a week ago. Actually I think two weeks ago.
    Only the sessions I the committee I was on had picked aren’t the same ones as the ones PASS published.
    <insert four letter words here>
      ______-_______ _______ ________ ______ ______
    </four letter words rant>
    I understand that PASS needs to make money from these sessions, and there are marketing issues involved. However the instructions I had stated that my committee “Make decisions with regard to all Program aspects of PASS Community Summit.” (emphasis mine)
    Apparently that’s not the case. I’m not going to disclose which session I picked that didn’t make it, and which one  got picked instead. That’s not fair to either speaker, and not the point.
    If marketing, money, other issues are the important ones, that’s fine. If you ask others to pick sessions, and supposedly decide on what the community wants to see and what is good for PASS, then let the committee do that. I can’t speak for the rest of my committee, but we were caught off guard and not happy with this decision. I’m upset because I wanted to make a difference to this process, try to do a good job, defend the decisions of the committee and take the flack for those decisions. I was also trying to ensure that PASS wasn’t choosing people because they’re a part of some “old speakers network”. I feel I’ve failed there since I didn’t make a difference, and the old speaker’s club reigned.

    If that’s the way PASS wants to work, let some non-SQL, non-DBA, non-volunteer honk just rank everyone and pick the sessions they think are important. Publish the rules and guidelines and make it happen.
    Just don’t waste my time as a volunteer.

    To be clear: My committee sent selections to PASS some time ago. We were not informed, queried, or told of any changes. One of our pre-con sessions was demoted to an alternate. One we picked as an alternate, not sure it was one we wanted to see, was moved to a regular session. Nothing in the comments below seems to give a good reason for this.

  • SQLSaturday Bequeathed to PASS

    I guess you could look at this one of two ways. Either PASS acquired SQL Saturday, or we (Andy, Brian, and I) bequeathed it to PASS. The truth is it’s a bit of both. We were looking to get some help in keeping the SQLSaturday events going, while also freeing up the time required to make them happen.

    This was mostly Andy’s baby, from start to finish, with support from Brian and I, so the credit really goes to Andy. He came up with the idea, did most of the work with various people around the country to get the events setup and running, and he attended more than anyone. I think most of the event organizers would agree that Andy’s mentoring was invaluable in getting the SQL Saturday franchises up and running.

    This was a non-profit venture, which really didn’t make any money for the SQL Share (formerly End to End Training and JumpstartTV) company. It was a nice marketing move, it was great for the community, and I think a fantastic idea for keeping the SQL Server community vibrant. It was also a little bit of a time sink. That wasn’t great for something that wasn’t generating any revenue in this economy.

    This is a perfect venture for PASS to be involved in. It fits their mission, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more events in the future under the PASS/SQL Saturday brand.

    I had the privilege of going to 3 or 4 events over the last few years, and I’m looking to try to get to a few more this year. I’ll still be supporting the events, and speaking when I can.