Its Still Alive

Yes this blog is still alive!  I recently had some hard decisions to make with regards to what I needed to drop in order to get at least 3 hours of sleep in a night.  And unfortunately for the 3 of you that read my blog, it was the blog that lost that battle.  I should be getting back in the habit of writing now that the biggest crunch time for the program committee at the PASS Summit is over.

What happened?

Short answer : The PASS Summit speaker selection process. (Program Committee Manager role)

Longer yet short answer: The PASS Summit program committee leadership position is a very involved volunteer position, taking more hours of my time than I can count (Just ask my wife!!).  For the last month the 4 amigo’s (Jeremiah Peschka (Blog|Twitter) , Lori Edwards(Blog|Twitter), Elena Sebastiano (PASSHQ), and myself) have been working tirelessly towards the first goal of announcing the community sessions.  With that out of the way the PASS work doesn’t stop, we get to do other “fun” stuff.  Innovate with PASS if you like, because that’s what we’re going to try to do!!   

Community Choice Sessions

Ive talked about this before  and I’m happy to say, after quite a bit of work in ironing out the details, it is going to be a reality.  We’re in the process of building the pages, but I can already say that 20 Speakers are going to get a second chance at being selected to present one of their sessions at the Summit.   In order to make this happen, we went over the summit track selections, looking at alternates first, then other sessions that were ranked highly by the review teams.  We collected 20 sessions that we thought could fill in gaps in the educational offering, or that we thought deserved another look.  Essentially, we took the work the selection teams did and distilled it down to give the community 5 session choices in each of 4 different groups

We split up the sessions into 4 groups, 1 each for the tracks AD/BI/DBA and then added a fourth as a sort of menagerie containing sessions across all 4 tracks.  We plan on using the “PASS voting booth” to facilitate the voting in each category, so each “registered PASS Member” will have a vote for a session in each of the categories.  At the end of the voting period, the session in each category that has the most votes will be confirmed & put in the lineup to be presented at the 2010 PASS Summit in Nov.

Next week we should have all of the details finalized and Ill write more about it then but, for now be on the lookout for an email from PASS with more details about how you can help directly shape the sessions at the 2010 Summit.