SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps
Posts tagged Volunteer
Last Chance to volunteer for the 2011 PASS Summit Program Committee
Feb 21st
Today is the last chance if you wanted to lend a hand to the 2011 PASS Program Committee. I wrote about all the gory details two weeks ago here. If your interested please get the survey filled out today before 9PM PST. You might as well do it now though, no sense in putting it off until the last minute!
PASS Summit Speaker Agreement revisited
Feb 17th
Speaker Agreements… Legal, Necessary, but awfully sticky
Every year PASS asks the speakers at the Summit to agree to some relatively simple terms and conditions. I don’t consider them to be anything overly involved or overbearing. For those who haven’t seen them they basically establish that a speaker owns the content they are going to present, that the speakers act as professional as possible, don’t market their products, or their companies products, and allow PASS to record the sessions.
This year the hangup for me is related to that last tiny bit. For regular conference speakers asking them to allow recording of their 1 hour session isn’t a big ask. However where Im reevaluating what we’ve done in the past is related to the all day preconference sessions.
Last year PASS recorded the preconference sessions and offered them for sale to PASS members. Just like the preconference sessions where the speakers get a portion of the admission fee, the contract called for the speakers to get a portion of the sales from the DVD’s. At the time this seemed like a fair way to do things and I still believe that the revenue share is fair.
Drawbacks
Ive heard from several different people that if these preconference sessions are recorded that it may become more and more difficult for PASS to attract the top tier SQL Server speakers to do precons. I can appreciate the position of some speakers on this, if they are giving their best content and we are distributing it digitally for what amounts to a few hundred dollars they run the very real risk of loosing actual sales of training material, or potential clients.
Benefits
On the other side, I need to weigh the risks of potentially shrinking the pool of available speakers with the benefits to the community of being able to offer these recordings. The other benefit is of course the money PASS makes from these DVD sales. To be perfectly clear, the amount of money PASS makes off of DVD sales in general is merely a pittance in the scheme of things. Having the DVD’s available and leveraging the content however is very valuable to our members and something that I think is important enough to at least explore what can be done to hopefully find a good balance
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
The way I’m leaning on this is to leave things the way they are and see if we see an overall drop in the quality or quantity of our preconference presenters in 2011 onward. I have however thought a lot about possible ways we could create a workable model, where we allowed certain preconference speakers to opt out of recording. This could get really messy administratively, and cause some confusion/anger with attendees not knowing which sessions will be included in the recordings. The other alternative is to just stop recording preconference sessions totally, although I dont think this is a good option.
I guess what I’m trying to do here is expose an internal debate that Ive been having with myself. Ive found that often if I spend the time to write something out it helps me organize my thoughts. As a bonus occasionally, I get great comments/ideas from the 2 of you who read this.
PASS Program Committee Management Transparency
Feb 10th
I occasionally get into trouble for thinking that no one cares what I’m (we’re) doing for PASS. Frankly much of what I work on is BORING to a casual observer. Im still not convinced anyone really cares about the minutiae that we have to deal with week in and week out on the Program Committee but, I don’t know if that’s just myself becoming desensitized to the amount & importance of what I (we) do.
My friend Andy Warren (Blog|Twitter) mentioned something the other day about their being minutes posted on the PASS site (somewhere) from the meetings that are held in relation to the SQL Rally. In the Program Committee we’ve produced minutes for the meetings that we have for quite a long time (2+ years) and they were simply emailed about and stored on PASS’s intranet site, they’re mainly used for keeping track of deliverables.
Change
Starting with our last meeting (first substantial meeting of 2011) Ive asked that we publish a copy of the minutes to the Program Committee webpage on the PASS site. http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/SpeakerResource.aspx Look near the bottom left of the page for the first meeting minutes. At some point, we may have to look at separating the Program committee info from the actual speaker info on that page but, for now this was easy and took basically no extra work from HQ or anyone on the team.
Useful?
So, the question is (and I rarely get answers to questions in a blog post): Other than to be able to say, yes we publish those minutes, does anyone even care? Will anyone read them with any regularity? Ive personally never looked at the Rally minutes, so I’m thinking its not going to be that valuable.. I agree that in general transparency is a good thing but, to a point like this I wonder if anyone out there cares.
Information overload
We will meet bi-weekly for the next 6 or so weeks but from that point on we usually meet weekly, and often a few times a week when crunch time hits. As you can imagine, that creates a huge amount of minutes. I hope that we dont wind up burying good information people might want to see simply because we meet so often.
PASS needs you
Feb 9th
Help wanted Needed!!
This year my portfolio within the PASS board is “Summit program and speaker management” Ive been involved with this portfolio for at least the last 4 years. This year, I’m going to be transitioning into yet a different roll within the committee. Ill still be heavily involved but, I’m turning the majority of the day to day decision making over to Lori Edwards (Blog|Twitter) She was hugely involved last year, and I have no doubt she will work her magic again this year!
Program Committee Changes
This year, there are going to be some changes to the processes in the program committee, Ill detail some of those in a later set of blog posts. For now, Ive decided to split up the groups of volunteers in the program committee to hopefully enable some of the future process changes.
Help Wanted
For this year we’re going to need help in many areas
Abstract Review Teams (led by Lori Edwards)
- DBA/Cloud/BI/AD/PD
Speaker Review Team (led by Tim Ford)
- This group will review speakers independently of their abstracts
Speaker Enhancement team (Wes Brown & Grant Fritchey)
- This will probably stay a small group and work on updating sample abstracts, selection info, generating info for new speakers etc.
PPT/Abstract Editing review/approval (Led by Tim Martin)
- This group will be working on sessions after they are accepted (lots of new ideas here)
Special Projects (Led by AJ Mendo & Lance Harra)
- This group will be working on finishing the Speaker Evaluation tool, coordinating changes to the Summit online tool as well as a few other projects that are envisioned.
Cutting edge
Its been said that what we do in the Program committee is on the bleeding edge of what PASS does in organizing groups of volunteers at the national level. That is to say, we need lots of help but, sometimes things dont always work out quite how we (I) had expected. I say this only to set expectations that its not always a smooth ride but, rarely is it not interesting.
We developed an online survey to help us capture all of the relevant info about everyone who wants to volunteer. Don’t worry, its not a job app and it shouldn’t be resume quality, we’re primarily looking for general information
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22BSJTXJZEA/
Please consider this a personal invitation from me to join us in making the content at the PASS Summit 2011 the best ever!
Reflections of a Board Meeting
Jan 26th
Ive officially been on the Job as a Director for PASS less than a month and already I’ve had the chance to participate in 2 in person Board meetings. 1 at the summit (non-voting) and 1 this past week in Dallas. Ill be the first to admit, I didnt really know what to expect going in but, I had some ideas.
Going in to the 2 day meeting last week I figured there would be some good conversations, a bit of brainstorming, a fair amount of arguing, and at least touch of indecision. What I found was roughly what I expected in that regard.
The Specifics of the actual meeting were by in large important but boring for the casual observer, so I wont be spending countless bytes that you wont want to read rehashing everything. After the meeting minutes are published (2 weeks im told) I may revisit this post with thoughts but until then I figure I can wait a few months to rock the boat on details that werent overly “interesting” to the community at large.
Things I learned at last weeks Board Meeting
- When you have an Ipad in the meeting room, expect plenty of offhanded comments
- We’re doing a whole bunch of really good things in a piss poor less than optimal way
- The SQLRockstar who brought bacon to breakfast on the BOD wont eat it as he’s a Bacon Snob
- That a person can be a Bacon snob
- The ability to give a backhanded compliment is an art form best demonstrated during meetings
- Takeout Mexican food consumed in a hotel lobby will get strange looks
- Coups have been attempted (successfully??) in some user groups
- Getting 11 people to agree to a place for dinner is sometimes harder than getting them to agree about PASS Direction
What I was surprised the most by wasnt the funny quips, or the amount of good discussions, nor was it the ability of the board to identify problems. Nope, I was totally expecting to find that the board really does “get it”, and for the most part on whole I think they(we) do. What I was surprised the most by was the fact the hotel we were meeting at was channeling its inner Bush Garden:
no SQLKaraoke to be found but, Serious business instead
