I think our profession was the better for having a professional association, even if it never quite did as much as I wanted it to. I put a lot of time into PASS over the years and don’t regret a bit of it. PASS helped me grow and maybe I helped PASS grow some too. […]
Read more "The End of PASS"in my last post I wrote about thinking of the tools as being a separate thing from the event. Not a complicated concept, but does it matter? Maybe. Let me pose one version of what the future might look like. At a high level, it would be: something.org, the host for an open source version […]
Read more "Platforms for Events"When we built the first SQLSaturday it was about 2 pages of HTML. No login, no tools, just get it done. Worked ok. Didn’t work so well for the second event in Tampa as they had to call me to make every change. Clearly we needed to “empower” and as there was no obvious alternative, […]
Read more "SQLSaturday Doesn’t Have to Be a Platform"Not easy to say, Gareth passed away a few days ago. We’d both gotten busy and with Covid added in, we had not caught up in a while. Now, as often happens, it’s too late. I sure miss him. The memorial service is tomorrow, January 14, 2021 at 10:15 EST. Obituary and a link to […]
Read more "Farewell, Gareth Swanepoel"Similar to my earlier post on filing the annual report, once a year we have to file a tax return with the IRS. Basically if the revenue is less than $50k you can do the “e-postcard” filing. Here’s the trello card: Right off the bat I stalled because I didn’t know my user name or […]
Read more "Filing the Annual Tax Return for SQLOrlando"As a Florida corporation we have to file an annual report. Sounds complicated, but for us it’s a five minute task. Here’s the Trello card for the work I just did: One of the habits I’ve tried to stick to is when I do a task, especially one I don’t do often, is it look […]
Read more "Annual Corporate Report Filing for SQLOrlando"Following up on Should There Be A Successor to PASS? I have a couple more thoughts. One of the many complaints about PASS over the years was about perceived value. Most everyone saw the value of the Summit but after that it was not a simple conversation to convince someone in the audience about the value […]
Read more "Splitting up the Mission of PASS"PASS was a big influence on a lot of us and did a lot of good, if never quite as much good as many of us wished. I wish PASS had survived, but it didn’t, and now we’re at a crossroads for what comes next. We’ve got short term challenges as far as supporting events […]
Read more "Should There Be A Successor to PASS?"Over the past couple years we’ve been slowly evolving from a fairly adhoc plan of doing what we did last year to a semi structured plan that was mainly bullet points to a more structured and written out plan for 2021. Writing out a formal (ish) plan supports these goals: Explain clearly to the Board […]
Read more "The 2021 Plan for SQLOrlando"For all the groups the most immediate need is to rescue what they can of the mailing list stored at PASS.org and to have a new landing page and/or meeting registration site. The challenge on the mailing list is that you can’t export it (privacy!), so the best you can do is email (multiple times) […]
Read more "Some Post-PASS Thoughts on Local User Groups"