Dear PASS Community,

I am sad to announce that the PASS Board of Directors has officially accepted the resignations of Brian Moran and Jeremiah Peschka. Each is stepping down for personal reasons unrelated to his involvement with PASS. Both Brian and Jeremiah have been instrumental in the growth and success of PASS and will be missed on the Board. We wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.

On a positive note, I am happy to formally introduce two fantastic replacements for the vacated positions. The Board of Directors has approved the appointments of Mark Ginnebaugh, President of DesignMind in San Francisco, and Geoff Hiten, Principal Consultant with Intellinet in Atlanta, each to serve a term of one year on the Board. Geoff and Mark were both on the electoral slate in 2010 – more information about the outstanding qualities they bring to the organization can be found on the 2010 PASS Election site.

Please join us in congratulating Geoff and Mark on their appointments and welcoming them to the PASS Board of Directors!

Rushabh Mehta
PASS President

[cross-posted from Andy Warren's blog at sqlandy.com]

Last week I wrote about my goals for last year and some frustration at having to make some trade offs during the year, and as I write this I find that I’m struggling to define my goals. Some of that is goal backlash, but I think more it’s a lot of ideas in my head and a sense of not quite knowing which path to take.

Some things I know so far:

• I want to stop working at all on weekends other than a few SQLSaturday’s. It’s wearing me down, and family needs more time.
• I need some time playing on a team again. Four years working solo has me craving, at least for now, going after shared goals.
• I’ve been gradually moving to reduce my time teaching, and that feels right. I like sharing and the excitement of opening doors for students, but it’s not enough. I need interesting problems to solve.
• I need to decide in the next few months if I’ll run for one of the VP positions at PASS this fall. Tough call.
• I need to change how and how much time I invest in PASS. That’s not a sign of a lessening in commitment, just a realization that it’s time to move past heroics and make the next stage work.
• I’d like to put some time back into my schedule for mentoring and coaching new speakers and bloggers.
• I want to spend more time in the Florida technical community, in part to strengthen my network and in part to reduce my travel time while still participating.
• I’d like to get better at writing, but that’s a vague goal that needs some work.

That’s a start, and next week I’ll write more. I think my theme for this year is setting goals for things I want to do rather than things I should do. Not sure if that’s selfish, realistic, or maybe both, but feels like the right path for right now.

[cross-posted from Thomas LaRock's blog at thomaslarock.com]

I could not have said this better myself:

http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/denisem/archive/2011/01/04/a-seat-at-the-24-hours-of-pass-table.aspx 

Denise was able to summarize everything we are trying to accomplish with the next 24 HOP event. If you have not yet submitted your abstract you should consider doing so, and before the deadline of next Friday.

[Cross posted from Jack Corbett's Blog at http://wiseman-wiseguy.blogspot.com]

In our original plan for PASS SQLRally we had set this week as the week to start voting for sessions.  Unfortunately we are having to push back the voting for 1 week.  The original schedule was:

• Professional Development: Jan 4-9
• Database & Application Development: Jan 10-16
• Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment: Jan 17-23
• BI Platform Architecture, Development and Administration: Jan 24-30

This has been changed to:

• Professional Development: Jan 10-16
• Database & Application Development: Jan 17-23
• Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment: Jan 24-30
• BI Platform Architecture, Development and Administration: Jan 31-Feb 6

Why has this happened? 

There are a variety of reasons beginning with the fact that we put the event on a very aggressive schedule and didn’t plan for enough time between the PASS Summit and SQLRally voting, especially with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years being sandwiched in between.

It took longer than anticipated to break down the submissions into categories within the tracks.  Our goal was to have 11 categories (one of which would be Summit Showcase) for each of the main tracks (DBA, Dev, BI) based on the distribution of topics within the track.  That becomes more difficult when a third of the submissions in a track are locked into the Summit Showcase category.  Yes, that many Summit speakers are interested in SQLRally as well.  Another sign that this will be a great event.

We needed to communicate with some of the people who submitted abstracts to clear up some confusion we had when reviewing their submissions and we had to give them adequate time to respond.

Finally, we decided that we wanted to make the voting process an opt-in process.  So we will be sending out an email to the PASS member list with a link asking you to opt-in to the voting process.  Only those people who opt-in will be emailed the voting link each week.  The planning team was concerned that PASS members who are not interested in or able to attend SQLRally would consider the voting emails to be spam, if we sent each voting announcement out to the entire PASS member list.

What’s the final outcome?

The event team believes that delaying the process by a week and giving the voters more time to review the abstracts will lead to a better event.

The planning of SQLRally has been a learning process for all involved as it is the first one.  We are identifying issues in the process so that the next group planning a SQLRally will have a solid foundation to build upon.

Thanks for your patience.