Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA » Volunteer

Of Procrastination and Voting

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:01:25 +0000

If you are reading this, you probably haven't decided on who to vote for in the PASS Board of Directors election. You're not alone! Here's a secret [Shhh: don’t tell] I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for either. Have no fear though, for the first year in the history of PASS, there is a literal plethora of information on the PASS Elections Site about the candidates and their stances on «the issues»

So, consider this to be my personal invitation to you to follow my lead and stop procrastinating!! Go now to the PASS elections site, read about the candidates. If you want to know something about us, use the forums, and ask. I know at least 1 candidate that will answer your question. Once you've done all that come back here, Ill still be waiting. Now, do what I'm going to do: I'll be finding the PASS BOD email ballot, then Ill be selecting the link and clicking on «Allen Kinsel» & 2 other candidates then hitting submit!

I've never been known to be the subtle type, so I figure no sense in starting now. If you need a little more subtlety about why I think you should vote for me, look here. The #1 thing though, is you, PASS Member, you need to vote. It matters a great deal to our SQL Server community, even if you must vote for someone other than me [I disagree but, understand]..

5 things I want to change while on the PASS Board

Allen Kinsel — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:32:33 +0000

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last 3 or 4 months about «why» I wanted to run for the PASS Board. I think I have finally come to the point where I can distill it down into a list of 5 specific things that I will work to make happen while on the PASS Board

5. Pass Summit location. I believe that we can reach more of our membership by moving the location of the annual summit. I like the idea of a 3 year rotation in Seattle.

4. Transparency. I plan to continue the push for as much release of information as the community wants. Particular things I'd like to see: full disclosure of individual BOD votes, more exposure of the Executive Committee «election process»

3. Better Chapter Support. We need to do a better job at giving our chapter leaders what they need, some of the most frequently requested things on the chapter «needs» list could be completed more easily than many think if I can succeed with item #1 on this list. I don't necessarily want to «own» chapter support but, I think I can provide help to this group, especially where it lends itself to my strength in PASS : speaker management.

2. Professionalism. I want our association to become more professional. That is to say, to begin offering more than education as the primary benefit to membership. I think there should be more benefit to being a PASS member than education & networking .

1. Community Involvement. I want to get our volunteers engaged in as many processes and tasks as possible. I've done what I consider to be a pretty good job at getting as many people involved in the program committee processes as reasonably possible, Id like to expand that same involvement into all areas of PASS. I wrote a lengthy reply on the PASS election forum about this subject, let me know what you think.

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.

What I'm doing to evolve the Program Committee next

Allen Kinsel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:11:04 +0000

Since I wrote about how we've been evolving the Program Committee in the past, I thought Id write about some of the ways we're trying to change the Program Committee in the future.

But first, I want to clarify something that someone else pointed out to me. When I write about the Program Committee, I always say «We». When working on something as complex as the program for the summit, it is necessary to work as a very cohesive team. This leadership team I am a part of is who makes all of the tactical decisions about the way we manage the education at the Summit. I always refer to «us» as «we» because I cannot (and will not) take all of the credit for putting the Summit education together. Without the team, the committee wouldn't be half of what it is. While I have been the overarching member of this team (the 1 they cant seem to run off) , the others are always there when we have work to do. Well, except Jeremiah, He's got this new gig where he's a turtle hunter or something....

We've been working hard over the last 2 years to bring some exciting (well, exciting to me anyway) changes to the program committee. A couple of these changes you should start seeing official announcements about any day now but, I decided to be a tease...

We're going to be opening another limited call for speakers for a new session type

There are 2 new session types coming (well, 1 is a bit old but, its new & shiney)

Some additional thoughts I have about evolving this process are in no particular order

Expand the use of Community Choice Sessions to include pre/post conferences(1 or maybe more), Id love to even be able to give those who vote for the precon that is selected a discount code to use on that precon.

have a separate speaker review team that will rate/rank speakers across all tracks and sessions, so we can cut down on the differing ratings per speaker.

Allow that team to reject speakers without considering abstracts if they dont meet some predefined criteria (no exact ideas on those criteria yet)

Have a Virtual Chapter sponsored session category. The initial idea is if a VC is active, (say has XX events a year) we allot them 1 speaker slot that they can then award to one of their best speakers (as they see fit within some reasonable framework).

Use the session evaluation tool for all PASS events (local, chapter, sqlsat, summit, rally)

Expand the feedback for speakers when we dont accept their presentation at the Summit. Allow the review teams to leave free form comments, as well as a standardized reasons we're using now

The long evolution of the PASS Program Committee

Allen Kinsel — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:50:28 +0000

It all had to begin somewhere

I joined the Program Committee in late 2006; I spent the first 2 years working on the DBA track teams selecting abstracts. I have spent a good deal of time working on the technology (vendors) of the Summit (the software we use to manage speakers, room assignments, itinerary planner, etc.). After going through several demo's and actually attempting to use two different software packages, I started pushing for PASS to build our own software. We are paying a (small) fortune for what we use now, the only reason I can figure is that its much more robust than what we need for PASS. Last year I worked with PASSHQ to put together a project plan for PASS to build a new technology platform to manage the Summit. This year David with PASS HQ has started delivering on parts of the software. Once this is in place and we're not changing software every year/other year, we should be able to focus more on the process, and less on the new software.

Prior to last year, Pre/post conference sessions (AKA precons) and Spotlight sessions were 100% invite only, and the guidelines for who was allowed to present these sessions was never published outside of the committee. Beginning with last year, we worked to publish guidelines for who was eligible to present precon sessions. In publishing the requirements list for who could present an all day precon session we opened up the call for precons to include anyone who met the requirements. At the same time we opened up spotlight invitations to competition, where we invited more speakers than we had slots for in hopes of raising the caliber of these sessions. We also began using an easy to understand formula for who gets invited to present spotlight sessions.

In this same time frame we reached out to many experts and asked for help developing a speaker resource page. Prior to this there was no real information on PASS's website documenting what it takes to write good abstracts, or get selected as a speaker. We have pulled together quite a few resources to help develop speakers, including webcasts and sample abstracts, etc.

Growing bigger better speakers

I have blogged quite a bit about growing the pool of speakers and we have made some very good steps in the right direction in this space. There were two fundamental changes I worked into the program committee. The first was adding a «speaker bureau» option to the speakers contract. This will allow PASS (where the speakers agreed) to hand off speaker info and abstracts to the local chapters that the speakers are near, which will hopefully facilitate some interaction between the chapter leaders and some local aspiring speakers they may not know about. There is still work to do to build and enrich the process around this sharing of information back out to the chapters but the first (most important) step has been taken. I also worked it into the summit speaker contracts that we would release aggregate scores to the other speakers presenting so they could know where they stood compared to their peers. This was decided as a good first step in open conversations generated by the discussion in this post

Lots of internal Changes

This year a few things changed internally within the program committee, I separated the BI tracks review teams to match the fact that we now have 2 BI tracks, I also added an extra person to the DBA track team because, well, their workload increases every year and they could use some additional help. I created a true team of 3 to review precons and spotlights instead of the mgmt group doing that work. But, by far for me the largest change was getting Lori Edwards involved in the leadership of the program committee. Initially the idea was for her to get a team of task based volunteers who could work on some of the extra technology that the Program committee needed in order to work more effectively. The first thing I handed her was to take the monstrosity of an excel spreadsheet I had containing every speakers session evaluation since 2005 (when I first got a copy) and make it into a proper database, and get some reporting from it. After some discussions, we decided to build this as a system to hold ALL speaker evals for PASS or SQL Saturday, or actually ANY SQL presentation, the idea is when its finished if you have a speaker at any SQL event you can accept online evaluations and the speakers will get better feedback in one place. In addition, the organizers of PASS events will have better information as well. This task is still in process, but the first deliverable was a standard report of speakers and their evaluation scores and this was available for this years Program committee. Somewhere along the way, Lori became more and more involved with all of the bits and pieces of what it takes to run the program committee. Her involvement in these things has enabled me to reach out and not just do the same old thing for the Summit this year.

More evolution

This year I continued to push to evolve the program committee in several ways. One of the changes most visible to PASS membership was the Community Choice Sessions. Like all great ideas I'm not exactly sure where this idea was born, but I worked with people across the PASS organization to get this done. I wrote about the process a couple of times as it was coming into being. After involving over 1100 members, I would say this was a great success for PASS, myself and the Program group.

We are planning on taking the evaluation system that Lori and her team are working on and put it into use for the first time at this years Summit. In doing so we have planned to offer a new type of session that I've written about before. This will be what we're tentatively calling «best of sessions» where we take the session with the highest evaluation on Tuesday and ask that speaker to present the same session on Wednesday, repeating the same process for those who speak on Wednesday, asking them to present the same session again on Thursday. This should allow the BEST content at the summit to be seen by the most attendees.

It hasn't been all fun and games

This evolution and opening of the program process hasn't been all BACON and index seeks, there has been more than one change on this list that have caused many questions, and in some cases very involved discussions. We haven't always gotten everything right, but heck I'm happy that I can say I think we got it mostly right. There is always room for improvement and more to do to continue to evolve these processes,

I received my diagnosis

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:15:57 +0000

Luckily, I didn't have to pay a single thing for it.

Brent Ozar unwittingly made the diagnosis the other day in a comment on Stuart Ainsworth's blog (I shortened it a bit)

Since I have served on both of those PASS Committee's (Program Committee as a leader) I must be insane.

I mean, no one willingly jumps in front of that many bullets, at least not for long. Whether he meant it or not, Brent is right though, when you put yourself into one of these types of committee's you truly are opening yourself to all sorts of bullets. This sort of «target practice» has been one of the toughest things for me to learn how to deal with as a PASS volunteer. The good news though, is that its amazing what it will do for you professionally, its one thing when your «favorite» developer is firing Air soft bullets in disagreement with you, its quite another when leaders of the SQL community who you have a huge amount of respect for start firing .50cal's.

Many of my companies developers (several hundred total) have commented to me in the last few years that I have «mellowed» out a bit, a few of them have laughed and blamed it on old age, but in reality, I know its a side effect of serving in very public roles within the PASS Community.

More on PASS Summit Community Choice sessions & a general PASS update

Allen Kinsel — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:37:06 +0000

More on PASS Summit Community Choice sessions

Last week I posted about letting the PASS membership select 4 of the Community sessions to be presented at this year's North American Summit. As with most things I've touched lately, the devil is in the details. I have been working with PASS HQ quite a lot to get this process all ironed out. As of today, We are expecting the emails with all of the details to go out in the first part of next week. One of the last minute *details* we've had to account for is related to asking community members to vote in the 4 different categories, it turns out we aren't able to require it to work that way. The short reason why is because of the way the PASS voting solution is designed (remember, its actually designed for voting in the upcoming BOD election) We cant have 4 separate categories and allow you to vote only in 1 each. While we are still separating the sessions into categories and asking you to vote on each one separately, we wont be able to enforce it. As it turns out, its not that big of a change and even if our members choose to cast their votes all in the same category, their votes will simply be cancelled out since we are going to choose the highest vote getter in each of the categories. So start watching those email boxes for more detailed information!

Other PASS goodness

Summit Selection Process follow-up meetings, since shortly after the community selection process finished, I have been on phone conferences with the selection teams for feedback about the entire selection process. These meetings have been going great, and overall the feedback was extremely positive, both about the process and the volunteer experience in general. That's not to say the team members weren't critical of a few hiccups we experienced but overall it was good. In these meetings nothing was off-limits, and I got some GREAT new ideas that should really improve a few of the key procedural pieces of the process. Many of the technological limitations and issues we knew about going into the selection but, with all the timelines, we just couldn't get changes made quick enough. Since PASS is building a summit management tool for 2011, we should have many of those technology issues behind us for the start of next year's selection process. All in all, It always helps us to get feedback about the selection as soon as its over while its still fresh in everyone's minds. the #1 piece of feedback that kept recurring is: Communication is key. What I have taken from this is that even if you think everyone's on the same page, its often ok to ask again if there are any questions, better safe than sorry.

Microsoft Speaker selections, Ive been doing this for the last 4 years and this year was the first year where I felt like we (the community team) have been actively engaged with the Microsoft Selection process, we're still trying to figure out how all the different pieces fit together and where we can add value and community feedback into their processes. So far things are working better than I expected but not as good as I'd like. Seems to be the story of my life these days!!! All of this is great news for the community since it will produce a better Summit but, its been bad news for myself and the other volunteers working on it. For me, being the pseudo ring leader, Its just 1 more thing added to an already full plate this time of year. From the day the call to speakers is announced to the date the summit actually starts, is when things get pretty hectic with the Program Committee, there are always a few «regularly scheduled items» that have to be completed by certain deadlines not to mention the things that go BOOM. The regular scheduled stuff isnt a big deal, the BOOM's on the other hand, lets just say Disaster Recovery planning isn't just for Databases or Computers, it is valuable in most any important process.

PASS Program Update #3

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:09:00 +0000

Its been a while since I wrote an update about whats been happening in the PASS Program Committee. I just havent had time to write about it with all of the work thats going on in addition to my regular day job. Hopefully Ill have time now to do a better job at this!

The annual content survey was sent out and the results are in, I'd like to go on record now and say, Im not a BI user/admin/developer. We took the BI questions from last year's survey (which were obviously from 2008). Unfortunately, while going through them and updating the questions I didnt reach out to a BI person and get a gut check for the BI questions. So we wound up with some out of date info in that section. I swear we like BI @ PASS, I just goofed, there's not some secret conspiracy, and YES to the 1 of you who asked, I do read all of the comments . The good news, for those that asked, the survey results will be released as soon as we can get them collated and readable (any day now) **UPDATE** The survey responses are here there are definitely some very interesting tidbits to be mined from this.

We are making progress in working on several projects, from redoing the speaker resources, to developing a new system to house the speaker evaluation data. As with all things volunteer driven, these tasks are taking time but thats not unexpected.

The biggest project Ive been spending my time on is the call for speakers. The call for speakers (and resulting abstract review site) is always a huge undertaking. This year it seems to be even more magnified since we're undertaking a new vendor (the same 1 that does tech-ed). There have been quite a few bumps in the road along the way (I wont bore you to tears with all the details) A steady diet of 1-2 conference calls a week and about 50-100 emails a week and we're closing in on a useable product in the call for speakers site. The abstract review site, well that will be the subject of a whole other blog post in the future! Ill just say that right now Im hoping to find some spare pixie dust or at least a few extra rolls of duct tape and bailing wire prior to the close of the call for abstracts

There have been many discussions about changing some of the SOP in the program committee, I have blogged about some of those previously so I wont rehash those here again. Ill just add a few more ideas Ive been kicking around.

1 of the largest things that will effect the average attendee at the Summit is that we're exploring ways to allow 2 new session types this year.

1) Community selection – The current thought is to allow the community to choose from (pre filtered) submitted abstracts to choose a session per track (or some similar method/amt)

2) Best of the Summit– The current thought is to take the top session(s) from the first 2 days of the summit and repeat them on day #3

Both of these ideas have execution issues to overcome but, I think they should be doable for the 2010 summit.

Developing Better SQL Speakers

Allen Kinsel — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:10:00 +0000

I've been focusing on different aspects of speakers and their interactions with PASS lately. Id like to expand on that and take a large detour.

The AHA Moment

last week while going over some ideas and upcoming changes to the PASS Program Committee with my PASS boss, Jeremiah Peschka I had what I think is a great idea, and Id like to throw it out here and see If I cant help get it off the ground.

Speaker Development

It seems like a lot of the suggestions I've been getting lately with regards to the program haven't really been relevant to the problem I was trying to solve. At first I thought I wasn't explaining myself properly or I was writing in the same manner my brain works (all over the place) . Then It donned on me, maybe I'm trying to solve the wrong problem. (I know this was definitely one of my greatest moments of clarity). In a lot of what we do in the program committee we're really not positioned to help speakers grow perse. But, speakers still need help, they still want to refine their craft, learn new tricks, etc. I know I for one would love to get started speaking but, while I can tell who is a good speaker, I certainly don't know how they got that way, surely they weren't born with it!!!

The BIG Idea

Why cant we make a new Virtual Chapter within PASS for speaker development. I think this would provide a great venue for speaker development, It would be great if we could get the best speakers within the SQL community to give a monthly livemeeting about the different aspects of developing speaking skills. The topics could range from how to prepare for a topic, how to craft a great abstract, how to create great audience interactivity, how to create great demo's/powerpoints etc etc. There are literally hundreds of topics that I could see being presented that would be of great use to developing speakers. If the idea takes off, I could foresee an exchange of sorts, where hopeful speakers are matched up with experts for mentoring. Think SQLMatch.com where you look for a mentor for your SQL related speaking! I think with my grand total of 0 sessions experience I wouldn't be an appropriate person to lead this VC but, I would certainly be willing to help another more qualified person with the details and help out anywhere needed.

How can I see this through

If only I had some contacts in the SQL speaker community who would be willing to present on these topics? Surely there are some talented SQL Speakers that would be willing to step up to the plate and offer to help out those of us just trying to start the process of learning to present. Getting willing speakers to talk about these topics should be the hard part, the scheduling/leading the VC should be pretty easy but its still additional work.

So…… Which SQL Community Speaker/Leader wants to help me, help the community, and make this happen? I'm totally open to any ideas, I'd just like to see this get started!

Convincing your boss to pay for your training

Allen Kinsel — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:11:00 +0000

Things are tight

It seems like budgets are being cut everywhere, and IT training seems to be one of the first places cut. In an earlier post I outlined where you could get a lot of valuable training for relatively little cost. In this post I will explore a few methods that have worked for me over the years to get your boss to say YES to paying for you to refresh your fountain of knowledge.

The direct approach

It may seem obvious but, if you don't ask your employer, they cant agree to send you to a SQLSaturday, or to the annual SQLPASS Summit. So sometimes its just as simple as broaching the subject with your boss. But before you try that continue reading!

Explain the ROI

Many times the people who make the final decisions about training forget what a struggle it can be to not only stay current on technology but to actually excel with it. Last year PASS put together a very good list of ROI points This could be used for any SQL event, make it work for you.

Volunteer

If you volunteer for SQLPASS (at the local or national level) you may be eligible for a discount admission to the annual summit. This discount can range anywhere from 100$ all the way up to a full comp (free) admission. Armed with the discount, and your ROI documentation it can be quite a bit easier to convince your boss to send you to a weeks worth of invaluable training that they perceive to be discounted.

Offer to partner

A few years back this might have been unheard of but, I've recently decided to start trying this method to get approval for some training. Try to combine the ROI documentation with an offer to pick up 1/2 the tab for the training. For instance, split the cost, ask them to pay the airfare to a SQL Saturday, while you pick up the hotel, food and ground transportation. Another idea, offer to pay the airfare/conference registration(Free if you volunteer enough) and let them pick up the rest to send you to the SQLPASS Summit. Either way its a win-win for both parties, you get to make a small investment in your career, and it shows your employer your serious about that career.

Mix and Match

Hopefully you can take a few of these ideas and mix-n-match them to reach the ultimate goal of getting your desired education.

PASS TPS #1

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:00:54 +0000

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.