This past quarter several new Chapters have joined the PASS community:

Astrakhan .NET & SQL User Group, Russia, led by Yana Kuranova

SQL Professionals of Northwest Nevada, US, led by Christopher Sherrill

Taiwan SQL Server User Group, China, led by Byron Hu and Pohan Chen

Codificando .NET, Sao Paulo, Brazil, led by Erickson Ricci

PASS Beijing, China, led by Quan Zhang

BIDN, Johannesburg, South Africa, led by Mark Stacey

BITUGA, Portugal led by Paulo Matos

New Zealand BI User Group, led by Reza Rad

We also have had a lot of new Chapter Leaders join us in existing Chapters as well as rebooting some inactive Chapters and we look forward to helping them keep their Chapters thriving.  Be sure to reach out to your Regional Mentors and the PASS Community Evangelists for any questions you have, they are here to help you.

Regional Mentor Updates

It has been great to see more and more Chapter Leaders utilizing the great resources we have in Regional Mentors. We have some Regional Mentor changes to announce for January 2013.

Leaving the role of RM for the UK is Chris Testa O’Neill. Chris has done a tremendous job in helping with the awareness and growth of PASS in the UK the past couple of years and we are thankful for his efforts. Taking the reins in the UK and working along with Jonathan Allen in 2013 will be Mark Broadbent. Mark has been a great supporter of PASS as well as a strong Chapter leader and presenter, and most recently hosted his first SQLSaturday in Cambridge. His experiences in these areas will be a great benefit to helping others in his region.

Alexandro Prado is leaving his role as RM for Brazil after much success in spreading PASS communities in that region.  Due to the tremendous size and growth potential Brazil, we decided to appoint two RMs to cover that region. Luciano Moreira, of the Chapter in Brasilia, will work along-side with Laerte Junior out of Sao Paulo. Laerte was co-leader of SQLSaturday #100, the first PASS SQL Saturday event in Brazil. We are confident that Luciano and Laerte will make a dynamo team for that country, and we look forward to seeing what will come in 2013.

I’d like to once again thank Alexandro and Chris for their volunteer time commitment as well as their service to PASS in this key role for Chapters. Their efforts in their local regions will be recognized as the foundation that we will build on for years to come.

Updated Chapters Toolset

Chapter leaders have hopefully already heard about improvements we are making in the tools PASS has for Chapters.  We are continually rolling out new improvements so be sure to check in often for updates.  To see what we’ve been up to, if you are a PASS Chapter leader and have a PASS hosted DNN site, log into your admin page.  If you don’t have a PASS Hosted DNN site, head to the dashboard at http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters/ChapterDashboard.aspx. There you can see:

Profile/Addresses

We are displaying most of the information we have about your chapter within the dashboard.  I would like to request that every chapter leader log in to the dashboard and make sure the information is up-to-date.  Some fields are intentionally not user updateable so if a field cannot be updated, and needs to be corrected please send an email to with the update you’d like to make.  Please pay particular attention to the “Chapter Leaders” tab when making sure the information is correct.  In the future we will be relying on this information being up-to-date when making key decisions about Chapters.

Events/Meetings

For Chapters using a PASS hosted website, you can now benefit from the Events module integration.  With this new tool you can enter your event/meeting details in one place and it will auto update those details to the Events page of the SQLPASS website, as well as to your home page of your own Chapter website and your event will also show up on myPASS for members associated with your Chapter.  Other events module features include local timezone/ical support, prescheduling future meetings, uploading of meeting presentations/resources, auto archiving old events and more.  For instructions on how to setup & publish an event, check out our handy guide listed on the Chapter Resources page.  We will continue to update this module with more features in the coming months.  Future plans include linking to many other sites/marketing avenues as well as better support for RSVP’s and more.

Chapter Emailer

In addition to contacting those members who’ve registered with PASS and are associated with your Chapter, you can now upload your own mailing lists and email those specific lists about your Chapter.  Thank you for the great feedback about the Emailer during the Chapter Leader Meeting at Summit. We’re working to ensure many of your concerns will be addressed in future versions of the tool.  As myPASS use increases we are seeing more and more PASS members associate themselves with local Chapters so don’t miss out on this opportunity to reach a great pool of potential new members.

myPASS

MyPASS is the new default homepage for all PASS members who are logged in to the main SQLPASS.org site.  We designed this page to bring all of the Chapter and Virtual Chapter meeting information into one easy to use interface for your members.  While looking at myPASS please check your profile and make sure it is up to date as well.  Early in the new year, the Chapter dashboard will be getting the myPASS look and feel. It will show up on the left side as a tab that is visible only to Chapter Leaders

Summit Downloads for Chapter Leaders

Finally some news I know Chapter leaders have been patiently waiting for!  Chapter Leaders should now have access to download the Summit 2012 sessions.  The following should enable you to begin downloading/streaming the sessions immediately:

• Go to the Summit 2012 Session listings (you will need to login, or be currently logged in with your PASS Chapter leader Account)

http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Sessions/BuildSchedule.aspx

• Click on the “session recording” link next to the session name
• From there you should see a DOWNLOAD button below the streaming player
• Note that in order to play this file you may need to update codecs in your media player

If you are unable to download the sessions, please contact the helpdesk

Introducing Wendy Pastrick

As you may know by now, Wendy Pastrick was elected to the PASS Board of Directors during the last election, and will begin her term on the Board January 1, 2013 by leading the Global Chapters portfolio. PASS’s support of local Chapters through Regional Mentors, Community Evangelists, tools, best practices, and more has grown tremendously over the last few years, but there’s still much to do. I hope you will all welcome Wendy and continue to provide her the same great feedback you always have with me.  Wendy can be reached on .

Goodbye for now or until we meet again

As my year as Director of Global Chapters is coming to a close, I wanted to take this opportunity thank each of you for helping Chapters as well as recognize the progress we made together this year in helping PASS communities grow stronger.  We were able to make some very visible progress during the last year to better support PASS Chapters and their members and with the team we have in place I expect we will maintain that momentum going forward.

I’ll be staying involved with the PASS Community going forward and for now I’ll be focusing on wrapping up some of the Chapter tools changes and working towards a successful handoff of that project.  It has been my privilege to work with y’all and I look forward to seeing each of you in the future.

I almost didn’t publish this post once I saw what it became as it was too verbose. I couldn’t find a way to shorten it substantially and I didn’t want to break it up.  However, I wanted it out there for no other reason than to serve as a crutch to my aging memory.

Cliffsnotes Version Available

For most of you, the outline below should be plenty of info to help shape your opinion of my first term on the PASS BOD. However, for those that want more details (or are just bored for 5 minutes) the details are included afterwards.

Serving on the Board for the last 2 years has been a great experience and many of my successes and failures have been documented right on this blog but, I thought it would be good to bring some of that data into a single post

• Improved Board Communications
• Improvements to the Website – Chapter Tools Support
• SQL Rally US Decision for FY13
• Supported Global Growth
• Elections process Improvements
• Classifying & Moving Profit into Reserves
• Created a broader volunteer recognition program
• Supported creating and enhancing the community evangelist role
• Voted to move the Summit out of Seattle in 2013
• Supported in house building of core event applications
• Built a partnership for mobile event platform – Guidebook
• Added 1/2 day session to the Summit
• Expanded the role of volunteers in the Program Committee
• Created a process to allow community voting of sessions at the Summit

Communication

In the not too distant past, PASS directors weren’t the best at communicating things with the membership outside of official channels (minutes and connector articles). I believe in open and transparent communication whenever possible. I have worked to update this blog with information about PASS happenings at least semi-regularly since joining the board (31 Blog posts about PASS since 1/1/2011)

Website – Chapter support

Over the last 4 months I’ve been spearheading a rather large project within PASS to redesign much of the PASS member interfaces on the website. Being able to increase the exposure our chapter events have should help this grassroots section of PASS grow even stronger. This redesign should be live before this years summit if current projections aren’t off.

In addition to this, over the last 7 months I’ve been leading a separate project to completely revamp the infrastructure PASS uses to manage chapters. It’s an unfortunate reality that when I started in the chapter portfolio, nearly all of our information about chapters, including leaders, meetings, Regional mentors, etc was handled nearly exclusively in excel. We had a great deal of technical debt to deal with in order to begin properly supporting chapters. After a bit of counseling with the experts, we decided to throw nearly everything we had away and start anew. In the time since that decision, we’ve produced a set of tools that our Community Evangelists, Regional Mentors & Chapter Leaders are beginning to use.

I’ve also been redefining the Regional Mentor role within PASS to better outline in clear terms what a chapter leader can expect of an RM and what an RM can expect of chapter leaders and PASS itself! This is still very much ongoing but, we’ve already made some good progress and this group is on a better path into the future.

SQLRally

One of the more difficult decisions I’ve been involved with in the last year was the decision to cancel the North American Rally for FY2013. I believe the Rally model provides a fantastic opportunity for PASS to have a greater impact for more members. The North American rally process worked but definitely had some issues. I don’t think anyone who was associated would disagree however, I’m still of the opinion we could have fixed those issues by tweaking the event model in FY13. There were some great discussions about possible options however, I was not persuasive enough and in the end the board had to choose among priorities and voted not to have a North American Rally in FY13. I’m still optimistic that this will be picked back up in the spring for a FY14 US event.

Global Growth

Everyone on the board has been involved in the move to make PASS a truly international organization and I am have been no exception to this.  JRJ spearheading this group has allowed the board to make great progress on this objective. Much of this process has been collaborative and I believe we are currently on track to create a great global organization. If you haven’t read the info on the global growth site, I would encourage you to do so!

Elections

I’ve been quite vocal within the board (as well in the minutes) about my belief that for the health of the organization we should form a small group (3ish) yearly after the elections to function in an ERC capacity. I think having them meet a time or two yearly to go over the election process and any concerns from anyone involved makes a lot of sense, and allows the organizations processes to naturally evolve instead of the abrupt changes we’ve had in the past.  I don’t believe this group has to have a bunch of overhead but, I’d like to see it engrained in our culture.

Reserves

PASS occasionally makes a small profit in a given year based on how well the summit does financially. Since joining the board, I’ve been concerned with our process for handling this profit. We currently have a small amount of money in reserves and I believe for the long term health of the organization we need to be putting more of this profit into these reserve accounts. During our last board meeting I was finally successfull in getting an action item created to create a reserve policy and transfer FY11&FY12 monies into these accounts. To the average PASS member, this probably isn’t seen as a big deal and seems like a bit of minutiae however, increasing reserves for the organization in good times will allow us to have better options when things get tough again. Once money gets moved into the reserve account it becomes a bit more difficult for the organization to spend on a regular expense as it takes a board vote.

Volunteer recognition

PASS has awarded the PASSion award to one outstanding volunteer annually. Given the large amount of volunteers we have in the organization, I’ve always felt that we should be doing more to recognize them. Earlier this year I helped drive the creation of a true volunteer appreciation award program. The outstanding volunteer award is only a small token but, receiving recognition including a badge and paper certificate that is signed by the president of PASS is in my mind the least we can do for those who do so much for the PASS community.

Community Evangelist (1&2)

Prior to 2011 PASS HQ had experience in working with volunteers to do things like start chapters, administer SQLsaturdays, etc. However, HQ truly had no one on the team that had been there and done that in the community so to speak. Finding someone who had lived and breathed community for as long as Karla Landrum (Blog|twitter) had and was willing to leave their Job was truly a stroke of luck. However, convincing the board that this new type of community support person was indeed the best way to spend our funds was a different matter altogether. The face of PASS has been forever changed by this additional role and because of the great success of Karla, as of Oct 22 we will be adding a second Community Evangelist, Niko Neugebauer (Blog|Twitter) to help do even more things directly with the community.

Moving the PASS Summit out of Seattle

Back in 2010-2011 this was quite the hot topic within our community. Ultimately I voted to move the Summit to Charlotte in 2013. Only time will tell whether that was a good decision but, at this point I listened to the community and believe it was the right choice.  I wrote a lengthy reply in the election forum about this topic as well so I won’t rehash it here.

PASS Built tools for events

Early on when I was involved with managing the program committee I lobbied heavily for PASS to invest in the tools needed to do the job of managing our speaker selection process and scheduling for the larger PASS events. In the time since then we have invested heavily in custom built tools and I’m happy to say that even though there are occasionally bugs, the decision to build these tools has allowed PASS to scale events without paying large fees to 3rd party software per event. One interesting thing I worked into the tools requirement was an odata feed . Getting this baked in from the beginning has allowed many others to build applications that make use of the data in interesting ways.

Guidebook

In early 2011 We were looking for a vendor to deliver a mobile experience for the Summit. Because of the existing odata infrastructure for our larger events and new XML feed enhancements planned for the SQLSaturday site, I was able to work with HQ and guidebook to sign a 2 year agreement covering them hosting mobile applications for all of our single day and longer events (sqlsat+).

1/2 Day Sessions

In 2011 I created a new summit session type that has thus far proven to be a great addition to the event

Expanded Role of volunteers in Program Committee

When I began with the Program committee way back when, I believe there were a grand total of 8 volunteers on the committee. When I left as leader of that group we had approximately 25 people actively working on teams and an additional 10 people who were part time dealing with things as needed. By growing these opportunities we are allowing the community to play a greater role at higher levels of the organization. Hopefully some of those same volunteers will move on to higher roles in the org because of their initial involvement in the program committee.

Community participation in Summit session selections

While leading the Program Committee I attempted to involve the community at large as much as possible. Under my watch, for the first time the community was allowed to vote on several sessions to be presented at the summit.

If you like what I’ve accomplished in 2 years and want to see more done, please consider voting for me.

I’m running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference. Click here to read about why I’m running.

Serving on the PASS Board for the last 2 years has been a great experience, in those two years I’ve accomplished more with PASS than I expected yet  there is still more I’d like to see happen.  This is the primary reason I’ve decided to run for re-election to another 2 year term on the board.

During my initial year on the board there was definitely a learning curve.  Even after spending a long period of time as a volunteer, coming up to speed was quite a bit tougher than I had expected.  During the first year I asked for and was assigned the portfolio of the Summit Program committee which I had previously been volunteering on.  Having a familiar tactical duty during that first year while figuring out the learning curve of strategic leadership on the board was very helpful.  After my first year on the board, which was my 5th working on the program committee I realized I wanted a new challenge.  I knew I wanted to work on one of the biggest problems I thought PASS had so, I did a bit of lobbying and starting in January of this year I was given the Global Chapters Portfolio.  After spending some extended time with Karla Landrum (Blog|twitter) and several regional mentors it became obvious that I had underestimated the amount of work that chapters were going to need from me.  During this time it also fully sunk in to me the level of impact PASS could have by making it easier to be a chapter leader.  In the 9 months since them, I have seen a whirlwind of activity around what we’re doing for chapters and I’m proud to say that I feel like the community is starting to see some real changes in PASS’s support of chapters.

The decision

In some ways making the decision to run for the board again this year was a tough one for me.  In my estimation in order to be truly successful on the board and make a difference the community can see/feel it takes an average of at least 5 hours a week.  Likewise, if a board member wants to tackle some of the tougher issues that number can easily double, triple or more.  By no means am I saying this is an absolutely required amount of time, rather that this is what I considered the commitment to be by re-running for the board.  As much as I might have liked to convince myself that I could spend less time on next terms PASS duties, I recognize that I have an unfortunate personality trait where I cant seem to figure out how to do things at any other setting than “all-in” so while scaling back sounds good in theory, it never seems to work out for me personally.  In the end though my desire to finish what I’ve started and hopefully solve a few other issues drove me to decide to re-run for the board.

There’s more to do

In the last 9 months we’ve made a lot of improvements but, there is still a large amount of work to do for our chapters.  I plan on spending the coming board term putting in place the tools, processes and documentation that I believe will help our worldwide chapter leaders spend less time worying about the logistics of their groups and more time building and growing these great local groups.  In order to do this effectively I’ve been focusing on two specific facets of our chapter support.  Regional Mentors and their roles, as well as Chapter leader tools.  I expect that during the middle of next year the chapter tools will be significantly complete and additional things will be added to the list of things Im focusing on improving.  In order to tactically bring about real change, I believe it’s very important to focus on a couple of chapter needs at a time. The difficulty is that PASS chapters have many needs so juggling this and drawing clear lines is often quite a challenge especially as these priorities have to fit into the overall strategic PASS organization priorities.

Other Opportunities

In addition to everything I want to see accomplished for Chapters, I am also committed to working on a couple of other things within the PASS Board I should mention.

• Transparency – I believe we have made great strides in this area recently and I’d like to see us continue the upward trend and I plan on continuing to lead the board towards a greater level of transparency.  One thing in particular that I will champion is for every board member to communicate with the membership regularly.  For an organization like ours, I believe this is critical in maintaining trust and transparency while giving candid thoughts about the direction of our organization.  Since taking my seat on the board I’ve made 31 blog posts in the category SQLPASS. As I’ve been seated on the board for roughly 21 months that makes for an average of nearly 1.5 blog posts about PASS per month.  I’m not completely happy with that post count as I had intentions on doing better but, I believe our community is better off for having this sort of information freely (and candidly) available.
• Community involvement – I believe PASS’s greatest asset is our volunteers and we’re currently missing opportunities to involve them at all levels of our organization.  In my past role as leader of the Program committee I did a pretty good job of involving as many volunteers as reasonably possible to run that portfolio.  As the Chapter Portfolio leader I haven’t expanded involvement greatly because we already had a large group of very dedicated volunteers but, as opportunities arise I plan to involve more volunteers.  Looking for other areas within the organization to involve more volunteers should be a priority for every board member and our organization as a whole.  Increasing volunteer participation leads me directly into my my next point
• Leadership growth – PASS needs to do more to promote our next generation of leaders, in order to do that we must involve volunteers more at all levels of the organization.  We need to create opportunities for volunteers to participate in the decision making process, especially near the top of the organization.  I hope to do this by convincing the board to transition from the current portfolio system to a system where board members serve as chairs on small committees with volunteers from our membership.  Changing this process is going to become even more critically important in the near future as we pursue our international growth goals and dedicate some board seats to our international members.

If you believe in these changes and you like how I communicate them, consider voting for me. I’m running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference.  Click here to read about why I’m running.

As PASS Director of Chapters, I had my first set of meetings a few weeks ago where every Chapter Leader worldwide was invited and thought I’d write a quick post about it.

Getting up to speed in a new PASS portfolio and having something good to talk about takes time so this meeting took a lot longer to materialize than I’d originally hoped.  The primary delay was it took quite a while to get enough good content that I felt comfortable inviting 300+ chapter leaders to give an extra an hour of their lives to PASS.  Now that the initial break in time is handled and I know we’re making solid progress towards improving PASS’s support of Chapters (I’ll have stuff to talk about that matters) We’ve agreed to schedule these update meetings quarterly.  This is in addition to the update meetings we’ve already been having bi-monthly with Regional mentors and the Bi-Monthly(ish) Chapter update emails/blog posts Ive already been doing.

Global Organizations = Follow the sun = Hard

Trying to find a time (or 2) that accomidates 300 different people is extremely challenging, In the past we’ve held Regional Mentor meetings at 9AM CST and 9PM CST in an effort to allow as many RM’s as possible to participate.  We’ve had varrying degrees of success and quite a few requests to have a time that better fits those in the EMEA region.  So we decided to move the initial time of the Chapter leader meeting to 6AM CST leaving the 9PM CST meeting in place.  This seemed to work out OK but, being ready to present at 6AM local time was tougher than I expected, combine that with a PASS site that wasnt working properly and the first meeting went less than spectacularly.  In the future we’ll probably move the morning meeting back to 9AM CST and offer a third meeting option in the middle of the day that better supports those in EMEA.  The meetings are recorded and posted online for all to chapter leaders so theres always that option as well.  Im open to other ideas about timings of these meetings so If your a RM or a Chapter leader and have an opinion feel free to contact me to share it.

Chapter Leader Resources

Karla (Blog|Twitter) has been working incredibly hard to update the Chapter Leaders resources page.  She has made many updates and changes to this Chapter leader only page, one of the largest changes mentioned is related to the new process that book publishers are asking PASS Chapters to use.  Im optimistic that the new process will help Chapters get a better selection of books in a shorter amount of time.  Karla also added a new Chapter logo  as a resource on this page.

Chapter Tools Project

A good portion of time was spent going over the changes in tools that have been rolled out for chapters.

The aim of this project is for PASS to provide effective tools to minimize the marketing work Chapter Leaders have to perform and increase reliability of records all while creating a one-stop shop of resources to efficiently promote and run a PASS Chapter.

To date, weve completed updates to the chapter newsletter emailer, created a chapter dashboard and created an events framework for chapters to use in displaying their meetings.  The events framework is the latest update, it is currently used on the chapters portal, and although its currently a v1 release it handles many things chapter leaders let us know they wanted like Auto archiving of meeting details, Auto populating Speaker info, timezone display differences, uploads and more.  There are several other hooks planned in the future for this events framework but this should provide a good starting infrastructure as we build more on to it.

Community Meetings at the Summit

Also covered were the community meetings at the summit.  If you’re a PASS community leader one or more of these is likely for you!

VIRTUAL CHAPTER LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

8:00 am – 9:00 am

Led by Denise McInerney

SQLSATURDAY LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

9:30 am – 12: 30 pm

Led by Kendal Van Dyke

REGIONAL MENTORS

Tuesday, November 6

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Led by Allen Kinsel

CHAPTER LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Led by Allen Kinsel and Regional Mentors

In June & July we had 2 new chapters join the PASS Community

Appleton, Wisconsin Led By Jes Borland

Northern Colorado Led by Erik Disparti

We also have had a lot of new Chapter Leaders join us in existing Chapters and we look forward to helping them keep their chapters thriving.

I’d also like to announce a few new Regional Mentor changes. Please welcome Andrey Korshikov, the new Regional Mentor for Central Eastern Europe. Many of you will know Andrey from his work on the Russian edition of 24 Hours of PASS.   Joey D’Antoni will be stepping into a new role as the Regional Mentor for the US Mid-Atlantic region. Joey has been a Chapter Leader in Philadelphia, a SQLSaturday organizer and recently participated in the SQL Server 2012 Special Ops Tour.

Regional Mentors give so much to the PASS Community and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Andre Kamman and John Welch for all their hard work in the role. Andre was busy filling in for Central Eastern Europe on top of his duties as Regional Mentor for Western Europe while we looked for a great candidate. Johns dedication this past year to his role as Regional Mentor for the US Mid-Atlantic was also appreciated.

Chapter Tools

Chapter leaders may have noticed the new chapter tools are starting to be rolled out. If you are a PASS Chapter leader and have a PASS hosted DNN site, log into your admin page to see the changes, If you don’t have a PASS hosted DNN site, head to the dashboard at http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters/ChapterDashboard.aspx .  There you can see the changes including:

Chapter Profile

Check out the chapter profile page and make sure we have your address correct. We’ll be using this address for the mailings we have planned, including your chapters copy of the Summit 2012 DVD’s

Chapter Emailer

In addition to contacting those members who’ve registered with PASS for your chapter information, you can now upload your own mailing lists and email specific lists about your Chapter.  This is version one of the tool and a great way to reach PASS members interested in your group.

Chapter Kits

The Chapter Kits have now been mailed. Please keep an eye on the post for your package. Thank you to everyone who took the time to update their address in the mailing survey. The logistics of mailing packages to 250+ chapters around the world were enormous. If you have any feedback on the kits or suggestions for the next mailing please contact us

Summit

PASS Summit 2012 will be November 7-9 in Seattle, WA, USA.

Chapter leaders, check with your Regional Mentor for this year’s Chapter Leader comp code. Chapter Members can also recieve a 200$ discount for the Summit, check with your local Chapter leader for the discount code

The Chapter Leaders meeting at Summit will be on Tuesday November 6 in the afternoon. We’re looking for a few good volunteers to help us set up the structure and agenda for the that meeting. If you are interested please let me know. 

Community Evangelist

As announced in the July Connector, PASS is looking for an additional Community Evangelist. We’ve made great strides in the Community team but are looking to provide even more support to the growing number of PASS Chapters and SQLSaturday events.

 If you are interested or know someone who would be great for the job, don’t hesitate to reach out to Karla or myself. We are here to answer any questions you may have.

 Read more about the requirements to be a Community Evangelist here: http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog/entryid/447/Join-the-PASS-HQ-Team.aspx

Regional Mentor Travel

The Regional Mentor Travel program was a success with 11 RMs traveling to 9 chapter meetings and 6 SQLSaturday events. We’re in the process of revising the program for FY2013. The aim is to provide Chapters with speakers and connect RMs with Chapter Leaders. I welcome any ideas on how to best accomplish this.

Volunteer Appreciation Awards

PASS wouldn’t be what it is today without great volunteers like y’all. This year we’ve introduced a new program,  The Outstanding PASS Volunteer. This is awarded monthly to volunteers who deserve special recognition for their volunteer efforts. 

If you know someone who has gone above and beyond the call of duty check out http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/Volunteers.aspx to nominate them. Chosen nominees will be announced on the PASS website and receive a Certificate of Appreciation signed by the PASS President.

Speaking of “Thank You’s”, I’d like to take an extra minute and say Thank you to every Regional Mentor and Chapter Leader. It’s been an active first half of 2012 and I look forward to where the second half of the year will take us.

Mission Statement

I was asked by someone to write a mission statement for chapters. I don’t know if this qualifies in the truest definition of a mission statement or not but, I partially stole this from a friend and I hope he doesn’t mind: 2012 is going to be the year of the chapter.

Its been a busy quarter since I took over responsibility for chapters and there have many changes, hopefully this post can summarize the highpoints.

New Faces

During the past quarter we’ve seen exceptional growth of chapters, including seeing 12 new chapters formed across the globe!

A BI Chapter in Wisconsin, USA led by Farouq Abukhamireh

Algeria led by Badrou Zeggar

Bangkok, Thailand led by Fukiat Julnual

Ekatrinburg, Russia led by Evgeny Fedyakov

Kharkiv Ukraine led by Denis Reznik

Kyiv Ukraine led by by Konstantin Kosinsky

Las Cruces, New Mexico USA led by Colleen Barnitz and Russ Burns

Leicester, UK led by Gavin Campbell

Los Angeles, California USA led by Kim Schmidt

Maidenhead, UK led by Richard Douglas

Stavropol, Russia led by Maksim Lemeshko

Santa Catarina, Brazil led by Rodrigo Dornel

Budget Exceptions

Last month I put forward some recommendations to the board of directors for increased spending for the Fiscal year 2012 (ends 6/30/2012) two of those proposals were accepted and funded.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead 2 separate meetings with our Regional Mentors in order to bring them up to speed on what those proposals are funding.

The first thing this is going to allow us to do is send a “Chapter Kit” or mailing to every PASS Chapter around the globe!  I’m not going to spoil the surprise about what’s going to be inside but, we hope that Chapter leaders will find the contents valuable and can put them to good use.

The second program we’re going to implement is to fund some regional mentor travel to PASS chapter meetings and SQLSaturdays.  The basics are that we’ve given each regional mentor a funding allocation and asked them to attempt to visit as many chapter meetings in their region as they can, with the primary focus being on chapters especially those that need help with speakers, or are otherwise struggling.  We are attempting to fill a gap in speakers at local UG’s and allow the Regional Mentors to get out in the community and evangelize for PASS.

Both of these programs are new, and both are things that we’ve talked about trying for a good while.  I’m expecting to see both of these have a positive impact on the community and I’m expecting to get lots of feedback during the process and learn some lessons while we see exactly how this is going to work and what impact its going to have.

Tools improvements

Since I started with chapters I’ve been pushing forward with a plan to revamp the existing tools our Chapter leaders use to manage chapters and I’m happy to say I’m starting to see some real movement towards helping with our needs in this area!  I expect the first round of changes to start being rolled out within the next 45 days.  As this project continues ill continue to write about the new and exciting changes we’re making.