Facility9

I haven’t blogged about what I do on the Board of Directors until now. I didn’t think people would be interested in it because there are times when it’s not the most thrilling thing on earth to me – ask your manager to describe the most thrilling part of his job, I guarantee that it isn’t going to be “getting into fights with panthers.” Just in case you don’t know, I’m on the PASS Board of Directors where I am currently the director in charge of the program for the annual Summit. I have expanded that portfolio (using the jaws of life and about 85 gallons of expanding marine epoxy) to include education in general. When I’m not working on the PASS Summit I’m making school children read Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming.

Here’s what I do during my week.

Program Committee

PASS Summit Planning HQ

The PASS Program Committee is the group of people that work to bring you the sessions at the PASS Summit. There are a lot of volunteers involved in the entire process, but Allen Kinsel and Lori Edwards help out on a weekly basis. Many of you know Allen from his previous involvement with the PASS Program Committee. Lori came on board this year to help out running a lot of the projects and teams that come up around the program selection process.

What do we do, exactly? Well, we have a conference call every week. On this conference call we (Allen, Lori, and Elena and Craig from PASS HQ) work through the processes and challenges around the PASS Summit. This year we’ve done a lot of work around changing the vendor we partner with for the abstract submission process.

There are a number of smaller committees for each of the session tracks and pre/post conference sessions. In order to get everything working, we had to re-work the handbook for each of the committees to use to select abstracts. The handbook is designed to help everyone select the best abstracts and outline all of the processes used to select the abstracts.

After the phone call I usually go down to Don Pablo’s for a rockin’ good time.

Certifications

One of the things that I took on when I was elected to the Board of Directors was working on the certification process. A lot of people have expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. I’ve started working with Microsoft Learning on ways to make the process better. So far we’ve had a few conference calls, emails, and I’ve spoken with a few people in the community about this whole process.

This is slow going, it takes a lot of time and effort to look at what people want, put it together in a meaningful fashion, and then build a plan of action. I know that there’s some frustration in the community around this, I’ve read the forum post on SQL Server Central, I’ve talked to you guys at SQL Saturdays, and I’ve traded emails back and forth. If you want to get involved or if you’ve got an opinion, shoot me an email or sound off in the comments.

Speaking

There are a lot of people in the community who would like to share what they know. But they don’t. I’ve thought a lot about why people don’t get up and share what they know. The best way for me to think about it is to remember how I got started.

I first got started presenting several years ago at a previous job. We held regular lunch and learn sessions because it’s a good way to get people together and it’s a good way to share what you know. After a lunch and learn the organizer would sit down with the presenter and go over the results of the evaluation. This was incredibly helpful. The organizer might not have been an expert presenter, but then again I’m not an expert presenter either. The important part is that someone was there to help me and guide me through those early, introductory, steps.

Where is this leading? I’m not sure yet. Elena, my counterpart at PASS HQ, and I are working on some ideas that we think will bring a lot to the table and give everyone the opportunity to contribute and learn.

Summary

So, there you have it – this is what I do in the 10+ hours a week I spend working on all of my Boardly (Directorish?) duties. It’s a lot like middle management but without the pay or corporate parking spot.