I can tell you that PASS now supports non-PASS branded events. The person to talk to at HQ is Blythe Morrow, she's the community coordinator. There's been discussion around this recently at the Board level and we decided that it was important to help out the SQL Server community regardless of event branding.

If you need any assistance, let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm technically not on the board until January, but I'm more than willing to help out however I can.