Notes on the 2017 PASS Summit

Just a few notes: Weather on Wed was great, ok on Thurs, cold on Fri. Have had worse years! Felt like I saw fewer people this year (that I knew), in part due to arriving Wed after lunch and in part to many of them skipping the event due to Halloween Had a lot of […]

Monday Night Networking Dinner 2017

It’s on! Free registration at EventBrite. I wrote last month about not being able to make it to Seattle on Monday to help organize the annual Networking Dinner. Good news though, Lisa Bohm has volunteered to organize the event this year. It will be held at Yard House, 1501 4th Ave, Seattle, beginning at 6 […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 3

This year we held our fourth Student to IT Pro Seminar for the students at Seminole State College. It runs from 9 am to 1130, concurrent with SQLSaturday but in a different building. Here is the schedule from this year: Time Description 8:30 to 9:00 Check-in & Informal Networking 9:00 to 9:05 Opening Remarks 9:05 […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 2

SQLSaturday is really three sites. The public facing one (www) plus one for event admins and one for HQ to do overall admin. Most of the notes in this post apply to the site for event admins. These are all from my perspective which is biased in a few ways; I sketched the original concept […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 1

Part 1 will be about things we did (or didn’t) do and some lessons learned. In Part 2 I will share some thoughts on the SQLSaturday tools/web site. Part 3 isn’t really about SQLSaturday, rather our student seminar that we run concurrently. I’ll get to Part 2 and 3 as soon as I can. We […]

Non Profit Umbrella Org – Good Idea?

Note: Published too soon, so lots of edits from the first version. Sorry for any confusion. I had a question from my earlier post about SQLOrlando with regards to setting up an umbrella organization, basically asking “instead of each Chapter doing all this work, why not have one org?”. Great idea, at least in theory (and […]

More Notes on Non Profit Status

Following up on my post about forming a non profit here in Orlando, here are some notes that might help you get through the process a little faster: In the corporate filing for the state, use the IRS recommended language: Said corporation is organized exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, and scientific purposes, including, for such purposes, […]

SpeedPASS Download Naming Convention

This was the first time in a long time that I managed the check-in process of SQLSaturday Orlando and was surprised/dismayed to see that when I unzipped the download the filenames were all named with a less than helpful format; b9d73479-5a04-42a3-9f11-a56af7b56beb.pdf. The goal was to be able to quickly find the SpeedPASS for anyone that needed […]

SQLOrlando

We’ve haven’t had a good solution for managing money for SQLSaturday and our groups here in Orlando. In the early days I’d put the money in my business account, keep the receipts, figure out what was left to accrue for the next year, and let the accountant do the rest. It worked, but it was […]

PASS Travel Plans, Halloween, Networking Dinner, SQL Dinner & Game Night

Normally I fly out Monday to spend the week at PASS. It’s good to get there early to adjust to the time change, I like to attend the meetings on Tuesday, and of course Monday night is the networking party that Steve Jones & I have organized the last few years. This year I’m flying […]