Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • ASK SQLServerCentral – The New Community Model

    We had an unexpected switch last weekend. My boss decided that we were ready to move from the Stack Exchange (SE) to an alternative, OSQA.net, without informing any of the people that work on the site. Needless to say this wasn’t a seamless transition, but it was fairly smooth. The biggest issues were re-syncing logins and a few changes to the way the site works (and a little lost data, not sure if that’s been recovered).

    An apology was posted, and one was made to the editors as well. I’ve accepted mine, and I hope you accept it as well.

    But why switch?

    We’ve been debating this ever since the new Stack Exchange model was released. We, along with many other people running community sites, including Ask SQL Team, were left in limbo and had no idea if our site would be closed down. Despite the continued “promises” from Joel, Jeff, and other running the Stack Exchange framework, there hasn’t been any level of commitment from them, and we had no idea, if our few thousand users would be just dropped from the framework.

    There are numerous others that have been running SE sites who feel this is more is more of a monetary move by the new investors in SE than some grand plan for a better community. There hasn’t been a great guideline on what is an active site, what level of traffic you’ll need to move from closed to open beta and then to community, and there’s not even any level of guarantee that they’ll keep your community beyond that. The “promise” of SE being for the community morphed once already, and many of us, myself included, felt we could not trust that this would not morph again to better meet their financial goals of their company. After they have added more advertisements to Stack Overflow and other sites, which is fine, but it starts to morph the whole “we are here for the community” message.

    Even though we are a commercial enterprise, we’ve been around a lot longer than Stack Overflow, and I’d like to think we had the trust of the community, and have shown we have their interests at heart. We do listen, and we try to move this site in a direction that makes sense. However we compete with Stack Overflow, and Server Fault, with SQL questions. Having our site, and data on a platform we don’t control might mean that we would be shut down at anytime, or our questions just moved to SO “for the good of the community” (and of course, the good of Stack Overflow Inc.).

    So we searched out alternatives and OSQA.net seemed to be one of the best ones. They had good reviews, they’re open source, and more importantly, their team was much more willing to engage with us, talk to us, offer suggestions and feedback, and even do some development. For the time being we are hosted on their platform, with the idea that improvements, bug fixes, etc. made to their framework will make it’s way to ASK SSC.

    I apologize again for the sudden move, and I hope that we will eventually merge in more of the Stack Exchange style features into our own forums, as well as easily migrate some questions to/from the ASK site to our regular forums.

    I think the Stack Exchange framework was, and is, a fantastic way to facilitate questions and answers on the Internet, merging FAQs and forums in a very powerful way of helping others. I hope it continues to grow, and I’m glad to see some open source style frameworks in existence that will allow people to run their own communities.

  • Making a Little Effort at Networking – Part 1

    I’m not a big networking person. I know that it’s good for my career, but I’ve been lucky enough to get myself fairly well known, my picture is on daily emails from SQLServerCentral, and so a lot of people know of me. As a result, I don’t have to do a lot of networking.

    However I have started to make it a point to do some short sessions with people I don’t know at events. It’s easy to spend time with people I know, and that is valuable, but that doesn’t expand my network, or help me find people that I might want to know better.

    So I’ve started to do two things that help here.

    1. More than a Thank You

    Quite a few people want to say hi to me, shake my hand, or even ask a quick question. So instead of saying “thank you” and moving on, I decided to try and do more. As people do engage me, I stop, take a few minutes, ask them a question or two, get to know something about them, and make sure that I don’t disengage for at least 2-3 minutes.

    In doing that, I’ve found a couple things happen. The first is that I tend to remember the person more so that I recognize them again. It means that I have a little more of a connection, and it might lead to more interaction later on.

    I can also potentially get some good ideas. I’ve heard a few cool things about SQL Server or careers from a few people that I’ve stopped to ask a question about. Someone told me a LinkedIn story that helped them get a job. Someone else told me how they use SQLServerCentral, and that’s valuable information for me. Another person gave me some insight into their job, which is for a media company and that was just a neat thing for me to hear.

    For Part 2, tune into the next blog entry.

  • Speaking and Presenting Tips – Bullets

    I’ve heard this before, it came up in the Tufte seminar I took, and it also was something that grated on my nerves at TechEd recently. I was in a presentation and saw a slide titled “Agenda” that had bullet points like this:

    • History of xxx
    • Problem of DIY
    • Reference examples
    • Basic structure
    • Enhancements
    • Security
    • Common Uses
    • Expansion to other systems
    • Summary

    These weren’t the exact items, but it didn’t matter. This was a BI course on a Microsoft technology, but a Microsoft PM, and he read each of these, giving a sentence or two about what it meant.

    HE READ EACH BULLET POINT.

    Don’t do that. Studies show that people can read much, much faster than you can speak. By the time you’ve started to talk about this, most everyone in the room has read the entire slide.

    The same goes for any other slide. People read it, heck, as the speaker I’ll glance back and usually read the entire thing in a couple seconds and then start talking.

    Give people information that’s not on the slide. They’ll read what’s there, so go into depth on what you actually want to say. If everything is on the slide, why are you there? Just send them an article, or move them all to Starbuck and hold a “reading” of your material there, similar to what most libraries do for 4 year olds.

    Give people information that’s not on the slide, and don’t read what is.

  • The Exceptional DBA of 2010

    I’ve been a judge in this contest for the last 3 years, and each years we’ve had really good finalists, but typically a couple that stand out above the others. As we’ve gone through the judges’ voting, we usually agree on 3 or 4 of the finalists and then debate the last 1 or 2.
    This year we had a lot more interest, and a lot more deserving candidates. We didn’t have a lot of people in the middle of the pack, the whole pack moved up! We finally couldn’t get below 6, so we have six finalists instead of 5 this year, and they are:

    You can view their entries and place your vote at the Exceptional DBA site.
    The winner will get a trip to the PASS Summit and get their award at the SQLServerCentral party on Monday, Nov 8. You can see them at the party if you use the “SSC2010” code when you register for PASS.
    Hope to see you there and good luck to all the candidates.