SQLSaturday #48 is October 2nd, 2010, at Midlands Technical College in West Columbia, SC. I’ll be doing two presentations, one on Building a Professional Development Plan (practice for Summit!) and the other is DBA 101: The Basics. The latter is a presentation Steve Jones wrote and Brian Kelley asked if I would do instead of the statistics one I submitted, so I’ll be spending some time before then learning the slides.
There aren’t any direct flights from Orlando, so I’ll probably just drive up, leaving early Friday morning for the 7 hour or so drive up there, time to listen to an audio book or three!
Jack Corbett and I are trying a few new things at SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando this year (Oct 16, 2010) and I thought I’d share them here. We don’t know if they will work, but it’s fun to try!
For those of you planning an event I’ll challenge you to try new stuff. Look for ways to make it fun and to engage the attendees. At worst it doesn’t work and you try something else the next time. It’s fun to experiment.
Yesterday I did another presentation via Live Meeting, some thoughts from that effort:
Definitely need more practice.
Here is the slide from the presentation today for the PASS Performance Tuning Virtual Chapter. Thanks to all those that attended!
http://www.sqlandy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Introduction-to-Statistics.zip
I found this while looking for a quick way to throw some words into a slide, was thinking something along the lines of a tag cloud and this goes a step beyond. You can plug in a word list, point it to a page or feed, then you can apply styles and shapes – yes, shapes – to the final output. Some interesting options for creating and saving them, and all in a browser, no download needed. Below is the one I created for my statistics presentation and one from my current feed (so you can see my footprint!). Currently it’s all free, www.tagxedo.com.
I’ll be doing a presentation titled Introduction to Statistics in SQL Server today (Sep 7, 2010) at noon for the PASS Virtual Chapter. It’s designed to teach the vocabulary and concepts and open the door to some of the more complex cases that we sometimes hit with statistics. I’ve done this one a few times, but it will be my first time doing it on Live Meeting. LM is harder, at least for me, without the feedback to see how the audience is doing, much closer to a lecture. I’ll be sticking to the slides for the most part – at a live presentation if someone asks a question and I need to go ‘off the map’ for a minute it’s easy to control, on LM I find that just tends to confuse people!
Anyway, I hope you’ll attend, here is the meeting link. I’ll post the slide deck here on the blog after the presentation and if all goes well, the VC will have a recording of it online later in the day.
Another choice brought about by wandering the local library, Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States by Herman Obermayer ($11 @ Amazon). I usually avoid anything related to politics in the last 30 years or so, and still do! I’m sharing this because it’s a different book than might expect; it’s the words of a close friend about his friend and what he was like as a person. No, you can’t ignore that Rehnquist was the Chief Justice, but it’s not really about the decisions, it’s about the man.
Some interesting tidbits about him from the book:
There’s a great section that talks about cameras in the Court. Obermayer (“Obe”) was in favor of them, but it covers there conversations about how recording trial courts might serve as a leveler, but how those recordings could also be used over time to create caricatures of Justices. It’s a conversation about transparency and how to do it in a way that is positive, a question I continue to try to answer well.
I said above it’s a different book. It’s a friend grieving and sharing for a close friend now gone, and I think it’s written in the way I associate with Card’s speaker for the dead. It doesn’t feel like a book meant to capitalize on the friendship for money. At the same time, I think; would I want someone to write something like this about me, without my implicit ok? It shares things said between friends with the expectation of privacy, does that stop at death, even if well meaning? I don’t know the answer to that.
You won’t find anything revealing here about Court decisions. You’ll get a filtered view of it from one perspective, something the author discusses well in the afterword. If you’re interested in the Supreme Court you’ll find a few small things, and if you’re interested in the man, you’ll learn a few things. I think you’ll learn more if you think about the issues I noted above, and then for a few quiet moments reflect on what a book about you might say.
When I arrived at the Hutton Hotel in Nashville for the PASS Board meeting recently they couldn’t find my reservation. Customer service person number one handed me off to person number two, then to number three, and finally number four. I didn’t have the confirmation number handy and in fact had not made the reservation myself, so I was patient – could have been my fault somehow. Eventually they just decided to find me a room and in the process upgraded me to a suite. Later I found how it was a data entry problem, I had been entered as last name comma first name, so a query for first or last name just didn’t match. Strange but true!
It’s a fairly modern hotel, when you enter the room to get the lights to come on you have to put your door card in a reader inside the room, then when you leave you remove it and a few minutes later the lights go off automatically. Flat screen tv, easy to reach power ports, all good stuff.
But the shower was the best part of the trip. Not just any shower, one with electronic controls! I took the two photos to show you, the second one after I realized I forgot to get a picture of it in progress and since I had already removed the door card, the lights went out before I could get the second pic in normal light.
Press power, click OK, watch the temperature start at 75 or so degrees and sit for a few seconds, then it starts to climb up to the default on this of 103 degrees. Twist the dial on the right to change the temp. It’s got six pre-sets, and each of them will store not just temperature buy settings for multiple shower heads if you have them (sadly, only one here).
Most hotels have those very green and not very fun water saving shower heads. Not here. This was a ceiling mounted high volume shower, far better than I have at home. Not quite a fire hose, but definitely moving a lot of water. Combined with the pure geek fun of the shower controls was just excellent. The only strange part is that the controls are outside the shower, you have to step out and around the door to change the temperature. I think a sacrifice worth making for this combo!
Thinking this is something to put on the list for when we get around to the next home renovation (along with multiple shower heads so that don’t have to do the turn in a circle shower dance). Looked it up online and I think it’s the Kohler K-683. Not clear if is only the controls, controls plus valves, and whether it’s also a tank-less heater or not, but you can get it online for….$800 or so. Holy cow, $800?
Would I spend that much? Going to have to think on that one. It’s nice, but not sure that nice. A bathroom renovation not cheap, would it make sense to spend an extra $700 or so over what the usual controls cost? Will a lightening strike fry it? At $200 would do it in a minute. At $800? Hmmm. Don’t know!
Voting began yesterday with ballots mailed to qualified members. More information can be found here, including contact info for Hannes at PASS HQ if you think you should have received a ballot and did not. You can find more information about the candidates here, and I encourage you to read that and explore candidate blogs before voting. Voting is open for about another 2 weeks, so you have time to investigate and ask more questions.
Yesterday was an exciting time for PASS. As soon as ballots went out there was a surge of interest on Twitter, people voting (and often sharing their choices), others waiting – impatiently! – for their chance to vote as it took a while for all the email to get sent. Thanks for voting!
I’m borrowing the title for this post from the pre-conference seminar Don Gabor is doing at this PASS Summit this year. It’s a 2 hour seminar that happens Monday afternoon at 4:30 pm, which means you can do a full length seminar and attend this one, or if you’re arriving mid afternoon on Monday you can start your week by getting in the networking groove.
Here’s the outline:
Learn to network and make professional connections that will pay off for years to come from best-selling author, communications trainer and “small talk” expert, Don Gabor. Using demonstrations, exercises, role plays, and coaching that focus on networking at breakfast, lunch, between sessions and at the evening reception Don will guide you step-by-step through the networking process. By practicing confidence-boosting skills, tips and strategies you’ll see that connecting with your colleagues is easy, fun and profitable! Take-aways include: Using body language to build instant rapport Introducing yourself and remembering names Breaking the ice & keeping the conversation going Transitioning from topic to topic Ending conversations and working the room Following up and building business relationships Each workshop attendee will receive an autographed copy of Don’s best-selling book, Turn Small Talk into Big Deals.
Learn to network and make professional connections that will pay off for years to come from best-selling author, communications trainer and “small talk” expert, Don Gabor. Using demonstrations, exercises, role plays, and coaching that focus on networking at breakfast, lunch, between sessions and at the evening reception Don will guide you step-by-step through the networking process. By practicing confidence-boosting skills, tips and strategies you’ll see that connecting with your colleagues is easy, fun and profitable! Take-aways include:
Each workshop attendee will receive an autographed copy of Don’s best-selling book, Turn Small Talk into Big Deals.
Do you need business contacts? Of course you do! Just because you’re not a consultant or selling a product doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from business contacts. One of the fun parts of networking is that you just never know who you’ll meet or how it may help you (or how you may help them).
I’m going to this one, and I’m writing the $75 check to attend. I want to be in room with a bunch of other people that want to network, what better place to both meet people and practice new skills?
Now to be fair I’m biased. I met Don after reading his book about how to start conversations, hired him to coach me, and we’ve become friends. I don’t want you to attend so that Don can make $75, I want you to attend because I think he’s just about the best in the world at what he does. I watched him greet people coming into a room last year, hand shake and hello, and 10 minutes later name at least 50 of the 75 attendees. Remembering names is hard, and he makes it look easy. That’s just a part of his game!
Whether the boss pays or not (he should), I hope you’ll attend, we’ll have fun and learn a lot too.
Overall it was a great event, attendance in the 350-400 range. Boxed lunches instead of pizza (good!), not much in the way of drinks/breakfast (not so good), check-in ran smoothly. Everything seemed to run smoothly. Team Jax did a nice job!
The speaker party was a cigar bar, the second year in a row. I won’t attend (or whine) about this again, will just say for a non-smoker, it’s a terrible location. I knew some people there, but I felt noticeably less connected than I do at a SQLSaturday. The party was a good networking event in the sense of ‘good to see you again’ and do those follow up contacts, not as good for ‘lets sit and talk shop and get to know each other’. I think this reflects the emphasis on ‘party’ and not ‘networking’. Nothing wrong with either (or both), but especially if I’m going to travel to an event I place more value in networking. It definitely has (combined with some other recent stuff) thinking I need to put more work into my Florida network while continuing to build/maintain my SQL network. There is of course overlap, but I think I’m not working my local area enough.
I had about 20 people attend my statistics presentation and none were DBA’s as a primary role, most were – as you might expect – developers. Great group, good questions, and I wish we (PASS) did more here (working on a plan for that). There was a lot of BI topics on the schedule, not enough admin/developer centric SQL topics. Need more!
Lunch went well, they had to order pizza to make sure they had enough food. One problem they had was people bypassing check-in which is their primary means of confirming the lunch head count. Hard to fix, just need traffic control, check for name badges.
Mid afternoon there was an ice cream break provided by a sponsor and that seemed to go well, and is something I’d suggest to all sponsors to work out with the event. The ice cream people were very good at telling people it was provided by a sponsor and encouraging them to say thank you, and it seemed to be working.
The other thing I noticed is that almost all the sponsors were staffing companies. I think that bodes well for the job market, but I really want to see product/tool vendors attending, think they add a lot to the event. Not sure why not seeing many – maybe the ROI, maybe the economy, maybe just over booked on events.
Hopefully you’ve heard by now that PASS is launching a new event format called SQLRally in May 2011 in Orlando. It will be a two day conference, preceded by one day of seminars. Because it’s a new format, we can – if we choose – build a new process for how we pick these seminars. I wrote the draft below after reading some notes about the Summit process and some conversations with Jack Corbett and Kendal Van Dyke, trying to make it more open, more democratic, but still recognizing the fiscal realities of picking seminars. We will be paying these speakers, and in turn attendees will be paying to attend these seminars. That means we may have to exclude some topics that lack broad enough appeal, and that is ultimately a value judgment.
My hope is that we can do this and announce the five seminar speakers at the Summit at the same time we open registration. The reason for that is to generate some buzz around the event, to give potential attendees something to show the boss while we work on the really hard part, selecting the speakers for the conference. That means we’ve got a short timeline if we want to make that goal.
As I write this I’m struck that it’s hard to figure out where to start. Who gets to write this draft? Who approves it? As we’ve modeled SQLRally it’s a partnership between PASS HQ, the Board of Directors, and the local chapter, so I think ultimately it’s fair to have them make the final decision. But we don’t want to make that decision without a discussion with the community, so that brings us to this post today.
I hope you’ll comment on this process, and try to see it not just from one view point. Eventually we’ll settle on something, we’ll try it, and then we’ll revisit it afterwards to make changes for the next time. I don’t expect we’ll get it all right the first time, but it won’t be for lack of trying!
And now, the draft….
Pre-Conference Seminar Proposal
PASS is accepting applications to for three full day (7 hours each) seminars and two half day (3.5 hours each) to be delivered on May 10, 2011 at the Marriott World Center in Orlando. Applications will be reviewed by the selection committee and winners notified not later than October 29, 2010, with the official announcement of accepted seminars being made at the 2010 PASS Summit.
Our biggest goal is to select a set of seminars that will be interesting to a broad set of main conference attendees and that will be perceived as worthy of the additional expense. The second goal is to grow the next generation of seminar speakers for the Summit (Note: being selected for a SQLRally seminar does not imply or guarantee acceptance as a seminar speaker at the Summit).
Presenters must meet the following requirements to be considered:
Presenters will be paid $2000 for presenting a full day seminar, or $1000 for a half day seminar, and will be granted complimentary admission (non-transferrable) to the main conference. Presenters are responsible for their own expenses.
The selection committee will be comprised of one representative from PASS HQ, one representative from the PASS Board of Directors, one representative from the SQLRally partner Chapter, plus three community members. Each abstract will be review to make sure it meets the qualifications listed above, those that do not will be declined and the submitter notified. Eligible abstracts will be scored using the criteria in Appendix A. The top three abstracts in each category will be selected to proceed to the community voting round.
Note: We have not decided on how to choose the three community members. One method would be to randomly select a chapter leader, a previous pre-con speaker, and a community member from a pool of applicants. Too bulky?
PASS HQ will announce the candidate abstracts/presenters by October 7th and open community voting for a period of 2 weeks. The abstract with the most votes in each category will be selected as the winner. Ties will be decided by the Selection Committee.
Winners will be notified by email and required to confirm their final acceptance within 7 days. In the event that any winner cannot be contacted, the Selection Committee may void the selection and pick the abstract from that category with the next highest number of votes.
Abstracts must be prepared using the provided form and submitted to PASS HQ not later than midnight on Sep 30, 2010 (Pacific time). Candidates may only submit one abstract for consideration. Candidates who submit multiple abstracts will be disqualified. Candidates are encourage to put as much detail in to the application as possible, it both aids the Selection Committee and provides a strong basis for building the advertising material that will be used to market it if accepted.
It is our intention to stick as closely as possible to this document for the selection process, but this document does not cover every eventuality. In the event that the Event Team decides to deviate from the process outlined above, they will explain at the time the winners are announced why the change was necessary.
NOTE: Huge gap here, looking for help!
1. Speaking qualifications
2. Community name recognition
3. Overall quality of application
4. Broad Community Interest in Topic?
5. Community Participation
6.
7.
Appendix B – Seminar Application Form
Part 1 – Presenter Data
1. Full Name
2. Mailing Address
3. Email Address
4. Primary Phone
5. LinkedIn URL
6. Twitter Handle
7. Blog URL
8. Biography (300 words max)
9. Is MVP
10. Is MS Employee
11. Basis for qualification
12. Details of presenting experience (list event/topic/paid or free)
13. Links to video demonstrating presentation skills (minimum 1 required)
14. Details of community participation not listed in item #12 above
15. References
Part 2 – Abstract
1. Title
2. Length
a. Full Day
b. Half Day
3. Summary (300 words)
4. Suggested pre-requisite knowledge, if any
5. Skill Level
a. Beginner
b. Intermediate
c. Expert
6. Category
a. BI
b. DBA
c. Developer
d. Misc
7. List 5 skills that attendees will take home
8. Seminar outline
a. Broken down into one hour modules
b. List high level discussion points
c. List planned demos
Prior to creating SQLRally the world of PASS consisted of the PASS Summit which is our annual mega-event, the European Summit, SQLSaturday, chapter meetings, and the occasional launch event. With all that going on, did we need another brand? What market void does it fill? And how is it different from our other events? I think those are interesting questions on their own, but if you happen to be interested in business they are even more so – you’ll face the same kind of decisions at some point.
Let’s start with the branding question. We debated having an ‘east coast’ Summit, a Summit Lite, and even a SuperSQLSaturday. There might come a time when we need to conduct more than one true Summit in a year, but for now we really want to keep it as the top of the pyramid, have it remain the event to attend if you’re a SQLServer professional. We worried that a ‘lite’ version would dilute our most powerful brand, so we crossed that off as well. Leveraging our SQLSaturday brand was certainly interesting and we even called it SuperSQLSaturday a bit entirely to help us focus on the mission statement, but ultimately the brand didn’t work; this was going to be a ‘for pay’ event and we it’s very important that we preserve SQLSaturday as free.
The market void was obvious and loudly heard by the Board, we needed to take better care of our East coast members and until we can move the Summit, we needed an interim solution. Reactionary? Maybe, but sometimes it’s good to react to customer wishes, and we didn’t make the decision based solely on that. We needed an event format we could take to other countries that don’t yet have the critical mass for a Summit of their own. We also needed to build a progression for speakers – what I call a farm club.
We knew we needed a new brand and logo, but what we really needed was the vision, the understanding of what this event would look like, how it would be different, how it would be the same, and more. A lot of what we talked through in the process of building that vision was understanding the differentiators. Look at some of these, and then we’ll come back to the vision again:
Hopefully as you look at that you’ll see that SQLRally is positioned in the middle, maybe just a bit closer to SQLSaturday than the Summit depending on where you focus. There are other differences, for example we won’t be recording sessions at SQLRally. SQLRally will be slower paced than the Summit, less formal.
Over the long term we expect that location will always matter, traveling a short distance will always be attractive in terms of time and money. But location isn’t everything. We’re also betting that SQLSaturday will drive people to attend SQLRally, especially if they have to fund it themselves, or if the boss still isn’t sure about the value of flying them to the Summit. We also think that people will have a great time at the SQLRally and part of that will be absorbing the sense of ‘if you think this is fun, wait until you go to the Summit!’.
To me, SQLRally fills an obvious gap in a lot of ways. It’s also important to see that this is a big part of what PASS does for the community; it finds ways to bring together smart and passionate people and then tries to stay out of the way while good things happen. Of course there are a lot of details still to go, and we’ll try to share a lot of them with you between now and May 2011.
I’ll be doing an introductory level presentation on statistics for the Performance VC on September 7th, details and the LiveMeeting URL at http://performance.sqlpass.org/). For those of you who have been tuning for a while you’re not likely to learn a lot of new stuff, really focused on those new to the concepts and showing them where stats plugs in. Still, hope you’ll attend and ask a few questions, it’s practice for doing the same presentation at the Summit. I’ve done this one a good half dozen times already, still experimenting, still learning what is most important, what is worth showing.
Our most recent board meeting was in Nashville on Aug 19, 20. We had originally discussed meeting in Seattle/Redmond/Vancouver, but by the time we scheduled the August meeting a few of us had already committed to attending the SQLSaturday in Nashville, so it just made sense to have it there. I think that worked out well, and hope that we’ll try to do this more often. It’s a chance for Board members to mix more with the community, and for those of us that attend these events often, it’s nice to have one trip instead of two.
The minutes will be published in the next few days, so I’m just going to share notes on stuff I found of particular interest and/or had added to the agenda.
The first area was marketing for the SQLRally (coming to Orlando in May 2011). Right now we essentially have a 12 month marketing cycle for the Summit, and the concern has been that marketing the SQLRally takes away from the Summit. It’s a fair concern in many ways, but if we’re going to run multiple events per year (in whatever format), then we have to figure out how to do overlapping messages in an effective way – effective in making sure everyone gets news on both, but we don’t just send them twice as much email. Much of the marketing for the SQLRally will be grass roots and hopefully less intrusive. The net was the Board supports doing what we need to do to make our first SQLRally successful.
Next was transparency and I’m going to paste my raw notes at the end of this post, and you’ll notice I don’t have all the answers. Still, I felt like it was a good discussion and good support for taking the next step of moving much of our internal monthly reporting to posts on the PASS blog. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I’m thrilled at the progress we’ve made, the conversations about transparency are now about how to do it and not about whether to do it.
On Friday we spent a lot of time brain storming where we want to be in five years. I’ve had people over the years tell me a five year plan is just dreaming – and they are right. That’s exactly the point. When you look at what you want to do in a year, or during your elected term, those define things in a way that make you look at what you know you can do, you want to finish things, you know you have finite resources. A five year plan is a chance to ignore constraints and focus on vision. We ended up talking about two areas; global development and Summit improvements.
For global development, we have more questions than answers, and that’s a result of having a Board that is largely North American. If we want to do more in —insert country of choice here—, what can we do to help, and what should the governance model? I’m condensing a long and interesting conversation to about a line, but the net was right now, without understanding all the details, we think that each country or region probably needs to be their own entity, setting their own agenda, managing their own funds. The other part is we have to figure out how to make all that work together. Should we give country X as seat on our main board? Should PASS global get a seat on country/region boards? How do we make sure we work together yet still allow self direction?
The other part was how to make the Summit better. One big part of that talk was that bigger doesn’t necessarily equate to better. Anyone that has been to TechEd and walked half a mile to get to the next session knows that at some point the technical value remains, but the social/networking value seems to drop. We talked a lot about networking, we really see it as one of the big ways we can make a difference, and we listed a lot of ideas we’re going to investigate more. Some of that is tactical, but the real value was trying to understand what a really big 5 year win would be. If it’s not something concrete like doubling attendance, what is the goal? No final answers on that either.
That kind of work is hard, maybe the hardest. You don’t get to finish the topic with a firm sense of ‘did something’, there is no deliverable to show off, but it’s the way that a shared vision evolves, everyone tugging and pushing on a problem until a shared understanding results, even if the result in realizing there are a lot more questions to ask.
Finally, as you might expect, the recent election slate announcement was often a topic of conversation. I mention that not to restart that debate, just to tell you that we did discuss it, often in heated fashion. Mostly healthy debate, but it did add strain, and at least for me, was both tiring and a source of frustration. It was a hard conversation at best.
Transparency Notes -We’ve made progress on our minutes, but if you just read the minutes, that shares very little of the work that is ongoing and the thought behind the decisions. -Goal is to not to be 100% transparent, but rather in general to be translucent, fully transparent in some areas, opaque in some, and in between on most -Why? –Builds trust in the community, they have to believe we are working in their interest, very few secrets –Shows we trust them enough to share thoughts, take the risk that they may not agree –It showcases what we do, all of us. How can we be an organization about community if we can’t share what we do? –It showcases us, it’s really the way that we ‘get credit’ for the work we do –It’s a chance to get feedback outside the core group, reducing the risk of group-think, and shows that we are interested in getting opinions -Challenges –Risk that we publish something that is "secret". We learn to manage that by tagging things as NDA, and understanding that we have few real secrets – salaries, launch dates for partner products come to mind as real secrets. –Risk that info/opinions is incorrect or heavily biased, and contrary to "official" views of PASS –Risk that community will sharply disagree with a decision, or even a few vocal members, and that could escalate –Not all our volunteers are comfortable sharing, writing, making the decision about what is ok to share -_BOD has to believe in this for it to work -We have to make decisions that are right for PASS, but also sensitive to perception. It IS politics
–How to move forward –PASS blog is primary method for sharing our activities –Ever Board member writes a monthly update (or more frequently) for posting to the PASS blog. Any NDA items will be forwarded to the Board separately. I propose eliminating the PDF monthly report and only maintaining the blog report. We time these to release at staggered points. Absolutely ok to cross post to their own blog. Clarify what can be published as a board member vs a ‘plain old member’. –We also require that HQ staff (maybe a subset?) post on their activities monthly –We build a short document that explains our info policy to volunteers, something in the range of 1-2 pages. They also post to their own blog at any time, also send to us and we’ll post if we thinka appropriate. –We need to teach our volunteers to write (including BOD) and to understand that even if they don’t think it’s interesting, just showing that volunteers are working benefits both them and the organization. We will have some that cannot write, so we need some ghost writers to make sure that their work is captured –We need a process for dealing with ‘bad’ posts/conversations. This means we have to teach how to avoid being defensive, how to end a conversation, how to find the good in even the worst exchange. also making sure that BOD monitors. –Open discussion at Summit as last year, also encourage all board members to hold a discussion at any SQLSat or chapter meeting if attending (have to ask leaders for a slot/space) –Make sure our event leaders are publishing summaries, lessons learned, and get that on the PASS blog too. –Tag posts as "official", "BOD", "cross post" —-but who can post? Do we link/discuss negative items? –volunteer profiles, could probably do one bi-weekly?
How do we measure success? –Survey of trust/openness –# of comments on posts? –Name recognition/task recognition –# of blog posts –Score each volunteer on #posts???
