SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps
Volunteer
Call for Program Committee Volunteers
Feb 10th
The 2010 PASS Program Committee Call for volunteers is open, We’re looking for the usual assortment of people to help shape the summit in 2010.
Abstract Reviews
Ever wanted to have an input into which sessions are actually chosen for the summitt? The group of volunteers who do this are chosen from these applications. Its a very challenging endeavor but also very rewarding.
Special Projects
There are literally dozens of separate projects that need to happen every year in order for the Summit to come together appropriately. Things like setting up the mgmt software, reviewing the ppts, reviewing the chosen abstracts for grammatical errors etc. These people will also be chosen primarily from the applications received
Leadership
We need a couple of people who want to be involved in the PASS Program committee at a higher level, who have the time available to commit. No prior leadership experience is necessarily required, although it would likely be helpful. The only way we can succeed on a higher level this year is if we can get a few good people who are ready and willing to commit that extra bit and can help. Also, I have to admit there is a somewhat selfish motive here, I dont see myself staying in this current position forever, and the only way I can move on within PASS (and sleep at night) is if I can start training my replacement.
Application
If your interested in any of this head on over to the survey/application. The application period this year closes on the 22nd of Feb. So please do it now while your thinking about it!!
Image thanks to kev/null
Your relationship with your professional organization
Feb 9th
Do you have a relationship with your professional organization?
What is your professional organization? is it in technology? Something like Ineta, PASS, ISUG, IDUG, IOUG or one of the other various technology groups that exist. Or maybe your preferred group is more in the business side of things like ASPA, LOMA or AICPA. If you dont know your desired professional organization, take a second and plug in your favorite search terms + professional organization into “binoogle” and see if the results lead you to a new beginning.
Expectations
If you already know your professional organization, what do you expect of your relationship with your organization? Is it a two way street? Do you give as well as receive? Would you like the relationship between you and that organization to be stronger or weaker? Do they do enough to help you succeed, do they provide value? Do you do what you can to enable their success? A little overly rhetorical probably, but you get the point.
Relationships
Every professional organization (that I know of) requires many dedicated volunteers to succeed. The more help they have the more work they can get done and thus the more value that can be provided to the members (thats you and me!!) The relationship between members and the professional organization is certainly a two way street and both sides need to be at their best in order for either to succeed but, normally the relationship is onesided where the members gain more from the organization than the organization gains from the members, thats why there are thousands of members and hundreds of volunteers. If your involved in an organization, do they get the help they need and use it appropriately? Do you appreciate them? Do they appreciate you? is it worth it?
How can you add value to the relationship?
No matter what you do, or what your interests are I bet there exists an organization that could use your help. Why not step up today and offer your services? No matter what level your skills are, beginner, or Grand Jedi Master, you too can help your chosen org bring more value to its members.
This post is part of the Tsql Tuesday series
Program committee task–Speaker terms revisited
Jan 29th
This one has been sitting on my to do list for a very very long time, actually its been on my list since nearly the day after the 2009 SQLPASS Summit closed.
Admittedly Im not a PASS “Chapter leader”, nor do I attend the meetings in person more than a few times a year (its 3 hrs roundtrip to the local group during lunch) but, Im always looking for ways we can improve processes at PASS and Ive heard too many times to count over the years that we dont do a good job of helping chapters connect with speakers, or even providing a way for the chapters to contact potential speakers.
The other day I contacted Andy Warren about an idea I had for getting a simple speaker bureau off the ground reasonably quick since I know he’s had that on his mind lately. I’d like to think that his post on that subject was part of the fruits of that brainstorming session but, Ill never know. In order to make some of the things we want to do for the community “easier” we need to rework (in a small way) the speaker terms and conditions to allow for it.
Speaker Terms
Every speaker who presents at the PASS Summit is required to sign a contract that protects PASS as well as the speakers, its pretty simple really, even I can read and understand it. What id like to do is integrate a few “optional” opt in type items that would give PASS the ability to manage the connection between speakers, their submitted abstracts and the chapters that need speakers. The other day, I had to tell the Appdev VC that I couldnt refer speakers to them nor could I contact a few speakers on their behalf because we had never asked if we could contact the speakers in situations like that. I suspect many speakers would be ok with occasional contact from PASS HQ when speakers are needed. This should at least give us the ability to do a better job of making that connection
Help needed
I need a couple of people to hopefully form a small group & decide how best to accomplish this goal. With any luck someone out there would also like to lead this small group in making this happen.
leave a comment here or contact me at if you’re interested in helping
PASS Program Committee–Defined
Jan 28th
I get asked quite frequently about the different PASS committee’s and how a person goes about volunteering for them. I thought I’d take a little time and explain what the program committee does and a little about how they do it.
The program committee
The current program committee could easily be renamed “The Summit Committee”. This group of community volunteers are responsible for most pieces of education at the annual SQLPASS Summit.
Committee Members
Every year PASS sends out a call for volunteers for the program committee (usually in Jan-Feb). This call is actually quite formal with a few questions asked in an online survey. The answers to these questions are used to match volunteers to tasks within the committee
The Program Committee Structure 2010
PASS Board Member (2010 Jeremiah Peschka)
PASS HQ Elena Sebastiano & Craig Ellis
Program Manager (2009-2010 Allen Kinsel)
Program Leaders (2 or 3 for lg projects)
Abstract review team members
Tasked team members
PASS BOD Member
The program committee always has a BOD member in charge of overseeing everything, they are usually expected to come up with great ideas, keep everything running smoothly and handle the “problems” as they arrise. Actually the BOD members that get tricked into taking over program are very involved in so many decisions I don’t even know what they are!
PASS HQ
These 2 are the backbone of “getting things done” and making sure we volunteers stay on task and on schedule. In program, as with most high profile projects, once the deadlines start they never seem to stop and if they start to slip its not good for anyone!
Program Manager
Thats my current job, I wish I could find a job description. Id surely like to see it! Essentially, I like to consider myself the glue that holds the group together and keeps us moving in the right direction. Sort of like a project manager that actually works on the work of a project <zing>
Program Management/leaders
These are high level volunteers that work to meet more difficult goals. Such as define criteria and make selections of pre/post-con Sessions and spotlight sessions. Develop speaker resources, develop better evaluation procedures and various other similar things.
Abstract review teams
This group of volunteers, usually 11 people, is split up into teams by track (DBA, BID, BIA, AD, PD) This group gets the daunting task of reading and ranking every single submitted abstract. Then they are asked to choose not only the accepted sessions but alternate sessions. This process is several months long and the bulk of the work usually happens from Mar-May
Tasked Teams
This year I intend to change the requirements of the volunteers on the committee and split up the work a little more. Every year the program committee is asked to do more work since the conference grows annually. So, I’ve been looking for ways to split the work up even more. This has 2 benefits, one its less work for any one person or group of people. Two, it allows more people to get involved in a great organization.
This year I hope to pull together several task based groups (with leaders) to do things such as pull the session evaluation data together for all years available (2005 onward), review the session powerpoints, revamp the speaker terms, design and test our >proposed< new summit speaker tool, group abstracts, and several other tasks. There should be plenty of work to go around the biggest issue I normally run into is finding volunteers willing to take on leadership of these tasks which leads me to my 2010 program goals.
Goals for 2010 — I have 1 goal other than a successful summit program, that is to recruit several people into leadership positions within the program committee. It is my opinion that the only way everything PASS needs to accomplish will get done is if I can find a few good volunteers willing to lead tasks & projects.
PASS Processes and Results posted
Jan 15th
Openness
Ive been encouraged to blog openly about the Volunteer work that I do for PASS and the processes we use to get the work done. This blog is the first in what I hope to be a long series that will outline the different things that have to be done to bring a >somewhat< seemless experience to the SQL community
Pass Processes –what you (dont) want to know
The final PASS Summit session evaluation results have finally been emailed out to the speakers. This brings an interesting month and a half of PASS to a close for me. Back on the 24th of november I asked for some help to get the Session evaluations together and generate some results. As it turns out I had a huge outpouring of support from everyone wanting to help (Thanks again) In the end though, I wound up working with 2 volunteers: Tim Mitchell and Christina Leo, as well as Elena Sebastiano from PASS HQ to make this work…
To get to the end you have to start at the beginning
I’ve been involved with the program committee in various ways since 2006 so I have eval counts going back to 2005. We’ve tried various ways of upping the evaluation return rate over the years but until 2009 we have had little luck in improving it. This is a classic example of be careful what you wish for because you just may get it. We had an amazing 336% increase in return rate of the evals.
2005 — 3518
2006 — 2114
2007 — 2991
2008 — 2379
2009 — 8008
While the added evaluations will be of great use to everyone they created an unanticipated problem of having to manually enter these. PASS hired a temp to enter the data and since we didnt have an accessible designed database to store the data in we decided to use zoomerang. The sessions were entered directly into a zoomerang survey and the results were extracted into an excel file that was delivered to me.
Once we had the session results in hand Christina went through the rather painful process of cleansing the data and getting it into a format that could be used. The data was loaded into a SQL Server database, where Tim spent his time building an SSIS package to extract the data and put it into individual excel spreadsheets that could be emailed to the speakers. Once this was complete, I took a preformatted email Elena had wordsmithed for me and built an additional SSIS package that would read the email addresses from the db and send the attached excel spreadsheet. This was an excellent opportunity for me to expand my SQL Skills. I dont get to use SSIS in my current position, I always learn better when I have a real problem that needs solving so I enjoyed the work.
All was going perfectly, I was about to move on to my next task when the emails started to flow in with speakers asking where their results were since their spreadsheets were blank. This caused me to absoluetly PANIC. I immediately started to verify where the mixup was, when managing a process with so many moving parts theres always a chance that it was something in the process. After verifying that the evals werent in the original dataset, I felt quite a releif as it wasnt something in our process that ate the evals, it was something far more sinister…
The case of the missing evals
I contacted HQ about the issue first thing in the morning and they were obviously thinking the worst as was I. A few phone calls and emails later the options were “lost in the zoomerang DB”, “entered incorrectly” or “lost in transit”. I wound up getting an email at about 9PM titled “Crisis Averted”, even though the crisis want any of my doing, you can imagine the relief when I heard that the an envelope(s) containing just over 1400 evaluations had been found at HQ. They were apparently misplaced during the transit of the hundreds (thousands??) of boxes returning to HQ from the summit.
Now comes the hard part
About 48 hours later I got a new extract with all of the missing data in it. I only assume because of the speed we got these 1400 abstracts that every free hand at HQ was working furiously to get them entered. As it turns out Christina was in Europe and unavailiable to recreate what she had originally done and Tim was busy so I took on the task of recreating the process that was done the first time. Luckily, I had the source to Tim’s SSIS so that wouldnt be too much trouble. After about 5 more hours of work I had the data loaded into the proper taables and ready to be reported on. The process was updated and everything was re-run and with that, all the speakers got their evals and were happy, Success!!
Reporting on the data
I proposed that we generate a page for the summit09 site that had the top 10 sessions and other various data/matrixes for use primarily by the speakers. In the end it turned out that this info is very valuable to PASS for generating interest in the quality of the educational opportunities at the summit. Since there is a value add we had to work around how to “properly” release this data. Not a big deal, just an aspect some members of the community might not have even thought of. (I know I hadnt thought of it)
The Grand Finale
The link which I hope will be of some interest to both speakers and potential conference attendee’s
Here you should find the top 10 sessions overall, the top 5 sessions per track as well as all sorts of data that I extracted from the evaluation database. its also worth noting that these pages directly link to the presentations (and recordings for summit 09 attendees) so you can relive the best of the best today.
Did I miss something that you think is valuable? let me know and Ill see about getting it added!!
http://www.sqlpass.org/Events/BestOfSummit.aspx
Takeaways
PASS has some very “interesting” processes that backup the front end and thre is definetly room for improvement, the biggest issue is how do you improve a process such as this one without spend very much (any) money?
We need to design a database >gasp< to hold the speaker eval information and not rely on a 3rd party that only exports to excel
We’ve already enacted a change for 2010:The registration group will enter the evaluations from the paper immediately after they are collected, this should kill the delay in getting results back to the community. We >may< also go to a split online/paper eval process but, im hesitant to mess with a process that we had such a huge improvement , especially after earlier trying an online process with less than stellar results
If we combine these 2 items, I think it would be outstanding to have a realtime update on the main PASS website during the summit of what the top 10 sessions have been, and maybe even a “reserved slot” for a repeat of the top session per track?
The scoring system that we used to deliver the results (very poor, poor, average, very good, excellent) did not work well, we will go back to using only numbers 1-5 next year.
I’d estimate that I spent somewhere between 50 and 60 hours completing this task, and ill admit that some of that was learning new things in SSIS, but youd be amazed how many emails it took to put this piece of info out for all to see.
Photo courtesy of Kristin
