I presented Social and Not So Social Networking for the DBA. Of the attendees, 16 submitted an eval. Here are the results:

Expectations:

• Did Not Meet : 0
• Met: 6
• Exceeded: 10

Scores:

• Quality 1: 0
• Quality 2: 0
• Quality 3: 0
• Quality 4: 4
• Quality 5: 12

Comments:

• Brilliant
• Very good info and points made
• Great info on how t build and maintain a network for I.T. as well as in general.
• As always great info and a great session. I was hesitant to add you to LinkedIn before, but now I definitely will.
  

Not bad considering I couldn’t get the projector to connect to my laptop and had to go without it. For me the fun measure is expectations, my hope is that it levels the playing field somewhat, I should get graded a little harder at this point in my career. Of course, I don’t know if they had really low expectations going in!

Picking up from yesterday, once we got through the confusion of the room changes everything settled down. I checked the lunch count and it looked like 210, I had ordered 240. Was 200 right? I sure didn’t want to explain to someone that paid for lunch that I didn’t have lunch for them! Decided to stick with the plan and keep an eye out for late arrivals. Started making the rounds, had one speaker no-show but all else was fine. SSC (believe it or not Seminole Community College is now Seminole State College) provided someone on site to help with AV plus staffing a table, so we really had no problems there.

We had moved lunch to 1230 this year to give us more time to adjust, but the lunch place was used to moving fast, so the food arrived at just after 11. Which might have caused a problem if had needed more food, but maybe they had more drivers? Ah well. We left everything in bags so that people wouldn’t grab food at the 1115 break, and then started setting up after that, setting up three tables; turkey, roast beef, vegetarian. Last year we had one ticket taker, this year we had three, one at each table because we had people coming from two directions and a single line just wouldn’t work. Jack caught the potential issue, funny how the little things add up when you change your plan on Friday morning!

We had lunch in the courtyard as usual and everything flowed well. Lots of little groups on the grass, only a few people eating alone and I made the rounds to try to get them into groups. Food situation turned out fine, we had about 20 meals left which ended up going to the security guard and the maintenance crew (which did a great job for us). It’s hard to describe, but lunch at these events is just….calm, serene perhaps. Everyone having a good day, enjoyed a well earned lunch, looking forward to a good afternoon. Weather was perfect, mid 70’s, sunny. It’s the lunch that most of us want, but few get to take!

After lunch I sat in on a mini session by Kendal Van Dyke, marred a little by problems with the display but was still interesting. Immediately after that it was Kendal, Jack Corbett, and myself doing a panel discussion about blogging and speaking. Basically unrehearsed, I thought it was the best panel we had done so far, each trying to let the others answer first, trying to answer where we had a strong opinion, and Kendal bringing up some blogs to highlight a few things while we talked. Lots of interest, good questions, and kind of exciting, if even a few of those attendees begin blogging and speaking we can end up with a very nice bit of growth in the local community.

The blogging session ran a little long, so I had to get moving for my own session on networking, breaking my own rule of getting there in plenty of time to setup. Naturally the laptop and the projector weren’t talking, I think due to the VGA connector being recessed on my laptop, but could just as easily been not pushing some button or other. Rather than hassle with it, I just moved on, being lucky that I had no demo’s planned. It’s a fun and wide ranging presentation, from “how” to network to talking about some of the common social networking tools and setting goals for networking. Good crowd, and I leveraged knowing a few people in the audience (Joe Webb, Jon Kehayias, among others) to try to make it a session with lots of participation. The one surprise for me was that perhaps 80% said they had gotten work from their network at least once – higher than usual, but I attribute that (as a guess) to the attendees self selecting, being further along the networking road than most I’ve talked to. It’ll be interesting to see the eval results with regards to the projector issue!

Session over, I headed back to mission control to get ready for the end of the day wrap up. By the time I got there almost everything was broken down and already headed for the truck, I just had to organize the raffle items and review the clean up efforts. We had maybe 40 books to give away, some gifts from sponsors, and some miscellaneous items including a banana Jack Corbett left too close to the raffle stack. Attendees entered the raffle by completing session evals and an event eval, so we had a lot to draw from. Our check-in area is on the second floor, and just like last year we did the raffle from the railing, calling out names and dropping books/throwing shirts to the winners. At one point we had a shirt in a tree, and attendees climbed for it! Some elected to go for the safe drop and retrieve, but many opted to try to catch (and succeeded). Somehow, strangely, we even had a Celko book in Polish. Lot’s of fun, no one injured, and then we were done!

Still more to go, I’ll write up some notes about pre/post event stuff, and things we got wrong.

I started the logistics preparations last Sun (8 days ago), finalizing the print version of the schedule, the eval cards, and other items that had been mostly prepped and needed to go out for printing. Tuesday night I had 8 volunteers come over for pizza and bag stuffing (a lot less stuff this year), and a walk through of the plan for the day. One of my volunteers (Deb) thought she could arrange to print some large versions of the schedule, Terrence took on getting 25 dozen donuts and a few gallons of coffee, and Bob owned signage. Off to a good start.

Deb confirmed that she could print 3x4 copies of the schedule at a reasonable cost – less than a buck each, so we sent over the schedule and room map on Wed. On Thursday I started going through my list and stacking the stuff that I needed – office supplies, sugar, sweet and low, books, etc, etc. On Friday Patrick Leblanc flew in and got to the office about lunch time, we went out for lunch along with Jack Corbett, then headed to UHaul to get a truck (that way we can load on Friday, just get up and go on Saturday).

While at Uhaul we saw this, thought of Steve – surely this could be a prototype for his next energy efficient car!

Here are Patrick and Jack “helping”!

And just in case you haven’t seen one, the official SQLSaturday truck! (Were I less tired and more creative, I’d add the logo to the picture)

From there to Costco to buy a lot of water and soda. Bananas didn’t look too good (wanted them for breakfast), so we loaded our stuff and back to the office to load all the other stuff. Done about 4pm, Jack and Patrick head out to change for the speaker party, I go to get cash for Terrence to get the donuts with, then finish up printing a few things. As things work out, right then – literally – my VPN license expires before I can finish printing the attendee list. Get that fixed, out of time, off to pick up Andy Leonard at the hotel and then to the speaker party.

We had the party at Jax Fifth Ave. Good location as far as travel, often a little noisier than we’d like – it’s a compromise. Had about 25 speakers show up, almost half of the total, and a lively crowd. Lot’s of discussion about PASS and the upcoming election, how to become an MVP, the seeming explosion of brands within the SQL community, networking, the PASS Summit, and more. We had people drift in and out, but the last of us wrapped up about 11 pm. That’s for an event that started at 6 pm. Calling it a party is probably not descriptive, though it is festive – it’s 25 old and new friends meeting for dinner and talking about just about everything.

Half way back to the hotel to drop Andy off we realize that we forgot the box with the speaker gifts (leather business card holders), so we go back to get the box, start back to the hotel again. I got home about midnight, printed the attendee sign in sheet (we still had people registering Fri night at 9 pm), and called it a night.

Up at 5:30, picked Andy L up at 6, and on site at the college at 6:30. Almost cold for Florida, temp probably 60, good temp for moving stuff around. Volunteers start to come in and we were all set up by about 7:15 am. We had the usual set up; a greeter out by the parking lot (Bob Blaydes), two sign in tables outside and the food and sponsors set up inside. Attendees got a bag with session eval forms, and event eval, some flyers and a few misc pens and stuff we had to give out. They also got a name tag and a lunch ticket. We charged for lunch this year, though it an optional fee – attendees could bring their own lunch if they chose, so it was important to make sure we had lunch for those that paid for it.

Perhaps the most stressful point of these events is the initial setup (what if doors aren’t open, forget something, etc) and lunch (do we have enough without wasting precious funds on too many extra). My plan for this year was seemingly foolproof! I printed 45 sheets of 8 lunch tickets, the attendee sheet was marked to indicate who had paid for lunch or was comped (speakers), and we would also allow attendees to pay at checkin. The idea was that at any point we could count the remaining tickets and have an accurate count.

But…as things are apt to do, we didn’t get it quite right. We had a few people that said/thought they had paid that we marked down for research, one table collected cash and the other had them come back later. We also separated a bunch of the lunch tickets in advance (perfed 8 to a sheet), which made it a little harder to quickly count how many left! In general it worked, but it’s always an analog process, never quite as smooth as I’d like – but from an attendee perspective I think it worked well enough.

Somewhere in there we realized that while we had all the supplies for making more coffee (to supplement what we purchased already made), we were missing the coffee makers. I had them on the list, they were missing, and we didn’t have time/volunteers to try to go get them and get back in time to matter. Luckily the coffee we purchased carried us through the first break. We used almost all of 25 dozen donuts and $27 worth of bananas (a big box!). Reminder – make sure to provide a non-dairy creamer (we had it, but I remember someone not seeing it and asking).

Backing up a little, left out one fun part. Friday morning we find out that in half our rooms we won’t be able to use the projector. We had plenty of alternate rooms, but the schedule was already stuffed in the bags as well as the 3x4 posters along with the room map. We made the change, got it wrong (Jon Kehayias called to let us know we had lost a track), fixed that, and moved on. Saturday morning we marked up the posters with the room changes, but forgot to put a note on the old doors. Joe Healy caught that and fixed, but we had a few minutes confusion at 9 am. Dumb mistake, we should have planned for that.

I can’t say enough about the value of the large printed schedule. We got ours at a cheap price, but even at $20 each I’d buy them again in a minute. Much much more effective than letter sized ones taped up, and I saw people coming back to them through out the day. Makes me rethink putting them in the bag. We always have last minute schedule changes. This time we had one speaker cancel due to a family illness, one no show, and two out of town speakers that asked to move to an earlier time. Regardless of when you print, something will change! It definitely caused mild pain, but everyone took it in stride I think.

Thought I’d share a funny story. Way back before SQLSaturday #1 my friend Shawn recommended a local shirt/embroidery vendor, I went over to meet them, and it’s the proverbial one person shop. Great work, great prices, never failed me yet. The kind of place you call if you need an immediate answer, email gets answered once a day. I went over yesterday to pick up the shirts for the event this weekend and we chatted for a couple minutes, she was excited I went with something besides white for the t-shirts (ash gray if you’re curious). Chat done, load up the stuff and head back to the office.

Open up the box to pull out the shirt for Andy Leonard and the first shirt was embroidered “Bob”, for one of my volunteers/speakers, Bob Blaydes. Looks good. Look at the second shirt, guess was embroidered? Blaydes! Little mixup in the communication there, so the first time speakers will get a first name shirt and a last name shirt!

I’m writing this in advance because I’ll be busy with all the last minute preparations, but I’m looking forward to a great day tomorrow. We still have a few seats open if you want to attend. The event is free, lunch is $10 (or you can bring your own). We’ve also got some mini presentations, plus a vendor presentation by Confio at lunch along with Lunch with Celko sponsored by Quest (picture Celko lecturing outside with 100+ attendees gathered around eating lunch on the grass!). Monday I’ll report back on how it went.

If you attend I hope you’ll say hello. I’ll be on patrol making sure all is going well, but the team at the check-in desk can find me if you don’t see me in the hallway.

We’re closing in on our October 17th SQLSaturday #21 in Orlando and I thought I’d share a few things about the event this year:

• 54 hour sessions plus 5 five mini (15 min) sessions – our biggest schedule ever
• Fund raising has been much more difficult than in previous years. I attribute this to the economy of course, but it does make it harder to do the nice to have stuff.
• We’re charging the lunch fee and it’s only had – so far at least – a minimal impact on registrations. I wish we didn’t have to charge for lunch, but given the sponsorship reductions I’m glad we did.
• We’re seeing a trend toward book publishers donating ebooks instead of real books. I get the economics, but there’s nothing like taking home something tangible.

Next week we’ll be starting the final leg of the effort, working on logistics and assigning volunteers to tasks. We’re in the same location as last year which definitely helps.

One more reason to visit Orlando this fall!

Lately I’ve been thinking that I need to try harder to focus on doing the things I both want to do and have to do, achieve a better balance than I have this year. One of my favorite things to do is speak/attend community events. It’s good practice for my speaking skills, a chance to network, a time to see old friends, and to some degree good business as it’s a low key way to market my services.

The challenge is that they are on weekends and by the time I leave early to be there for the Friday night speaker party and try to stay for the Saturday night after party (both prime networking times), the weekend is gone – meaning I work two weeks straight. I’ve already learned the hard way not to book two weekends in a row, that starts to feel like real work. Losing a weekend doesn’t seem like a big deal, but imagine giving up 12-15 a year. That puts a dent in relaxing time, family time, chores around the house.

For 2010 I’m trying to plan ahead and decide which events I want to attend with the goal of only doing one a month, and maybe nothing in December. The hard part is that there are a lot of good events, and more coming. Do I hit the established ones that I know will be good? Go to the new events to show support? Try to hit cities I haven’t been to so it feels more like a vacation? I’m also biased towards events that bring in friends from out of Florida, good to see them more than once a year at PASS. What about local events like the Orlando Code Camp? Or the Jacksonville Code Camp – good event and good SQL crowd?

One of the trends I’ve seen is for some speakers to show up, do their presentation, and leave. Probably not fair to complain about that, after all they are donating their time to present, travel, prepare, but it seems like just checking the box rather than really participating. As an event leader I’d rather have speakers that will be there all day, but if I’m struggling for speakers….well, then it doesn’t seem so bad! Maybe I’ll do that for the local Code Camps, better to do some than one?

So, a very very tentative first cut at my schedule:

• Jan – Dallas SQLSaturday
• Feb – Tampa SQLSaturday/South Florida Code Camp
• Mar – Charlotte SQLSaturday/Orlando Code Camp
• Apr -
• May – Jacksonville SQLSaturday
• Jun -
• Jul -
• Aug – Baton Rouge
• Sep -
• Oct – SQLSaturday Orlando
• Nov – PASS Summit
• Dec – No!

I’m probably missing something already. Thinking of an event for 2010? Probably not a bad idea to announce soon. I think there will be a few people in the same boat, having to make decisions about where to spend time and money, good to be first in line.

Jack Corbett sweated over the schedule, not easy to decide what sessions to use and where to put them, but it’s finally done, 9 tracks with 53 hour long sessions plus 5 fifteen minute mini presentations. I’m thrilled with the diversity of speakers and topics, it’s great that we have such a large talent pool in Florida and that we’re able to draw speakers from out of state too. Details of the event at www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=32, but I’ve included the schedule here too to save you a click!

Alas, this isn’t really a SQL post, but thoughts on efforts to share work that has been previously done by one person! For the past two years I’ve handled almost all of the work leading up to SQLSaturday Orlando, bringing in volunteers close to the event to help with logistics. It works pretty well because I have all the pieces of the puzzle and know that I have to get it done. The downside of course is that I add more work to a list that is already larger than it should be, and I’m not training anyone to take over sometime in the future.

The latter is a fundamental challenge of most businesses, and most fail badly at it. Ideally every leader should be grooming someone to be their replacement, just as they themselves should be preparing to move into the job that their boss does (note that I’m not suggesting a coup!). It doesn’t happen for a lot of reasons; lack of time, lack of candidates, fear of being replaced.

For me, my excuse has been lack of time. Dividing up tasks takes time, explaining how to do them takes time, checking on them takes time, doing them yourself when they don’t get done…takes time!

This year I’m trying harder to share, and I started that by including some of the key volunteers on all the email related to the event. It lets them see how I communicate, what kind of responses I get back from speakers and sponsors, and start to feel like they understand what is going on. Last week we met at lunch for a planning meeting and to divide up more tasks, and it’s quite a dance. Volunteers want to own tasks, but aren’t sure what is involved – is it really an hour task?  Or the “how” worries them, what should a message to a sponsor who isn’t responding look like? For me, there are some things that I’m not ready to let go of – key sponsors is one – and there are other tasks that are critical path and require some faith to let go!

In one case I asked Jack Corbett to request funding for the event via UGSS. First I had to add him as an admin, then he emailed back that he didn’t see the funding option. That required an email to our MS guy to fix that, then back to Jack, then finally get the request done. I’m worried that I’m annoying the daylights out of Jack, and he’s thinking the same – trying to help just added work! Some of it had to be done anyway, but it feels slow at times.

Management 101, right?

it’s the nature of managing anything that delegating takes time and adds complexity, but you hope you benefit from it in the long term. For volunteer events the more people that have ownership of it the better the event becomes, so it’s worth some pain to share the work and the knowledge.

Thought I’d share some of the event for those you not in the Orlando area. As of today we have 57 sessions submitted by 37 different speakers. Of the 37, two are Microsoft employees and at least are MVP’s. The one area where I wish were doing better is true local/beginner speakers and we’re going to make one final push to add a few more. Our planning goal was 8 tracks of 6 sessions each and we look to able to do that easily, and we may add another one. Call for speakers ends on Sat, it’s not too late to visit Orlando in October!

We’ve got 125 people registered so far and we haven’t announced the final schedule! Our goal is 325 attendees which means we need to register a LOT more people, but typically we’ve seen a nice bump once the schedule goes out (sometime next week).

One change this year is that we’re going to delay the final raffle at the end of the day by 30 minutes or so. In past years attendees tend to be itching to get out of the last session to be there for the raffle, we need time to setup after the sessions send, time to clean up, and we want to encourage networking more. All combined, we’ll finish sessions at 5:00 pm and try to start the raffle at about 5:30.  We’ll have soda and some light snacks available and will encourage people to stay until about 6 pm, and then those that really want to chat will relocate to a local tavern (Jax Fifth Ave).

All the details at www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=32.

Last but certainly not least we’ve just announced Kalen Delaney as a member of the Advisory Council. Now that we have our four members selected we’ll start sharing with them our ideas and goals for the next year to see what looks good and what doesn’t!

I had a great call with John Sterrett last week about the possibility of having a SQLSaturday in Wheeling and it looks like the main concern is finding speakers that live within a reasonable driving distance. I love the idea of bringing training events to smaller cities (we’re looking at one in Melbourne, Fla next year) and it’s entirely doable if we build the speaker pool.

So,  if you know someone close to Wheeling that would be a candidate for speaking, post a comment or send me an email.

Just announced at http://blog.sqlsaturday.com/2009/08/sqlsaturday-advisory-council-newest.html, Buck makes three – one more to go coming up soon!

Jack Corbett sent me an email this morning about the Swiss SQLSaturday, very cool! They did a great job on the graphics. First time we’ve had one outside the US and while I wish they had used the main SQLSaturday site, it’s delivering events to the community that matters. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

And no, I’m not sure why Jack was searching for Swiss SQLSaturday on Tuesday morning!

Posted today, Andy Leonard is the second person on the Council, and we’re glad to have him. Read the announcement and later this week we’ll announce #3. I’d challenge you to guess but I don’t have a prize ready if someone does guess, so just hang in there a day or two (I know who it is, but have to get the blog entry done!).