Hello everyone, your friendly neighbourhood Community Coordinator here.

We have been incredibly busy here at PASS HQ in 2009. The most momumentus occasion that I would like to report to you is that PASS Chapters have now exceeded 150 (155 to be exact)! In the past two months we have added our first chapter in Afria (West Sengal),  Nepal (Kathmandu), Sri Lanka (Columbus),  and Saudi Arabia (Eastern Province). We're all so proud at the Chapter community and those who made it what it is today. It's tough to imagine that in July we had only 80 chapters, and now we have almost doubled in size!

And with the increase in Chapters, we have also had a substantial increase in the number of resources available world wide. The most exciting of these is the Community Connection Sponsorship Program that is available to Chapters who want to put on an event. They recieve both financial and logistical help from PASS: something we haven't been able to give before. For more information, click here http://www.sqlpass.org/Events/CommunityConnection.aspx

In addition to support for events, PASS Chapters are also now recieving four mail outs a year, marketing materials, enhanced regional Mentor support, Live Meeting accounts/instruction, and webhosting.

We're all so excited here at PASS for the overwhelming response to our new initiates. Stay tuned, more to come.

Blythe Morrow

PASS Community Coordinator

Today we posted a major revision to our blog directory, growing from about 40 blogs to more than 180. It's a great way to discover new blogs and if you want to try them all, just grab the OPML file that is linked on the top of the page. Please let us know of any blogs we missed, we tried hard to find as many as we could! We're going to recheck the list periodically to make sure the links are valid and we'll be posting updates in a way that makes it easy for you to find changes.

More notes about the update via this post from Andy Warren, Director of Virtual Communities.

Let us know what you think!