Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

TPS reports, love them or loathe them, they are a necessary thing for most of us working in corporate America.  I firmly reside in the loathe camp, Just ask my boss.

In this case though, I've decided to start putting out regular updates about what Ive been up to for PASS.  I hope the benefit is 2 fold, 1 to allow a greater transparency into what happens behind the scenes and more importantly for me to have a place to reference what we did and when!

Summit 2009 wrapup

We sent out quite a few different surveys during/after the 2009 summit, some of them are listed:

The members of the program committee

The speakers

The «suggestion box»at the PASS booth

The Session Evaluations

The purpose of each of these sets of questions were unique and helpful (some more than others but I digress)

I wrote about the 2009 session evaluations previously

The other surveys were tallied and the results reviewed to see what we could do better, and to see what we're doing well as an organization.  I hope to write about some of these results later.

Summit Session Evals

I've written about this one before.  We had some technical difficulties with this one this year and I hope to iron it out.  One of the bigger mistakes we made this year was tossing the session attendance counts, its a long story exactly how it exactly happened but its already been remedied for 2010.  If this affected you, I am sincerely sorry.  PASS also uses this info to gauge many things so its a multisided loss.  We've got some great ideas cooking on more effective ways to give feedback to speakers from attendees, and as soon as we have something a bit more concrete I'll write about that too.

Software selection/creation

We are currently trying to decide on a direction to go with our Summit software, Its no secret that there have been issues in our current vendors software/DVD's, and we're exploring a few options (build vs buy etc) at the moment.  Once we have a decision Ill give an update.  Suffice it to say that a decision as important as this one is not easily made and we've had at least 20 hours of phone conferences (demo's included) and emails likely numbering past the hundreds about this.  We might be working through it a bit too much but, we have to get this right as the summit software is one of the largeer interfaces we have at PASS, between HQ-Speakers-attendees-volunteers-etc-etc.

Establishing the 2010 Program committee

We began working on updating the applications and handbooks that are required for the program committee, the application was tweaked a bit this year, and the handbook was freshened up a bit as well.  Volunteer applications are being accepted through Feb 22nd.  Im happy to say that so far we've had 35+ applications, while we wont need 35 people to review abstracts (the most popular job) Im 100% certain we can make use of all the volunteers, if we get a few people that are willing to make the next step and offer some help with leadership, Ive written a bit about this before

Speaker Bureau/Speaker terms

I set out a small group of volunteers with the task of redoing the speaker terms to allow for more «sharing of information» (opt out) between the Summit Speakers and the PASS Chapters.  Ive written about this before and Andy Warren has the lead on the actual implementation of this project, we were trying to enable him a bit and hopefully have succeeded.

Establish 2010 Summit Critical Dates

We have a pretty firm grasp of the steps it takes to put on a Summit but, every year we have to go over the steps and make adjustments.  We also need to adjust the dates for the current year in order to make the process work.  Now that the dates are mostly set, We have essentially kicked the rock down the hill.  Once that happens, the deadlines seem to pile up.