We just had our October board meeting, this one ran the full hour and was a good discussion, catching up on Summit progress, voting on who will win the PASSion award, and some ideas on future revenue generation to support our efforts. In general I think conference calls are not good for brain storming, but we made the most of it. At the end something went wrong and there was this reallllllly long echo. Technology!

Checked in on the networking seminar last week and we’ve done well for something new, about 25 seats left and hoping we fill most of those. Don is excited, and have to say I am too, more focus on networking ultimately is good for PASS and a great way to stand out from virtual events.

Grant is making good progress on the SQL Server Standard. He has one article ready for layout, but we’re still tweaking the layout. We’re close, and I think it looks pretty good. He’s still working on a final decision for cover art. Seems trivial, but ideally and practically you want something with a formula so that you have to keep searching for something each time you do an issue. We’re also still waiting on the final version of the content contract, and just worked out the process for managing author payments. All details, but with luck the first new edition comes out before or at the Summit.

I also did my interview for the VP of Marketing position. Kevin Kline did most of the interview and I thought it was a tough but fair interview. It’s an interesting situation, they already know me, which means it’s too late to try to make any character changes! We discussed my thoughts on the future of PASS (and I’ll share those next week after the selection is made), the responsibilities of officers in the organization, and the role partners should play. I think I did fine on some, on others clearly we don’t quite agree. Disagreeing is fine of course and doesn’t automatically disqualify someone – hopefully! Not sure where the line is here, so I’m going to opt for this overview for now, and maybe I’ll be able to share more later.

I’ve been really busy and haven’t had time to tackle as much stuff lately as I’d like, I still check in with PASS HQ to see how things are going. Still got a few projects in progress; blog aggregation, PASS store for shirts and stuff, blogger badges, and we just launched the Logreader contest for bloggers. Once we get through the Summit I’ll know what I’ll be working on next year, and hopefully transitioning to a new portfolio, putting a fresh view on our content strategy.