Publicizing Mistakes

I was reading Our Journey to Cloud Cadence, Lessons Learned at Microsoft Developer Division and saw this bit on transparency: “No incident is done until we have captured and communicated the learning from it. We use the “5 Whys” to capture the multiple perspectives on what can be done better next time. If we have an outage […]

Suggestions for PASS: Transparency & Communication

Earlier this week I posted How To Improve The PASS Connector in response to a general request for feedback about the Connector on Twitter. I had been accruing some notes based on my initial efforts on the PASSWatch blog and I used some of that as the source of the Connector suggestions, but I have […]

More Notes From The PASSWatch Project And Thoughts on Transparency

It’s been just over two months since I wrote the first post for PASSWatch. I’m trying hard to keep PASSWatch a “pure” source so I’m posting my notes on it here (and will include the link in the weekly summary of course). I can boil the lessons learned down to this: It’s not enough to […]

Warrant Canaries & Transparency

I recently ran across the warrant canary FAQ from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The concept is simple – put up a statement now saying that so far you have not been compelled by a secret order to turn over data to the government. Wikipedia has an entry for it. The example I read about […]

Meetings In Glass Houses

If you’ve followed my writing for a while you’ll know I’m a fan of translucency (transparency) in most things business. Right now I’m working next to a meeting room that has glass walls – talk about transparency! It seems like a good idea, it lets in a lot of light and makes it feel more […]

Looking Back

In July 2011 I took what felt like a big chance and a detour to lead a large and complex security upgrade for a large company. The project included replacing firewalls, re-ip’ing hundreds of servers, implementing updates to hardening standards, updating application logging, and a lot more. A ‘lot more’ doesn’t really begin to describe […]

Government and Transparency

I ran across this report that talks about the effectiveness of transparency requirements put in place around the Recovery Act (stimulus money). Don’t get caught up in whether you agree or disagree with the stimulus money, that’s a different discussion. My summary of lessons learned: Publishing the data didn’t quite yield an army of people […]

The Armor of Transparency

Yesterday I blogged about hosting a daily status meetings and some of the tricks I use to make it work. One of those that is worth extra attention is the meeting notes – at the end of each meeting I send out notes (not minutes – not that formal) that include: Who attended Key metrics […]

Money, Transparency, and Community Events

I’m going to ramble today. This is a complex topic and I think you’ll see by the end that I have some concerns but not necessarily the answers. None of this is new, but I think it’s worth looking at now that we’ve had some success. Back when I started doing the research that would […]

Authors Needed for the SQL Server Standard

As you may recall we relaunched this late last year, trying to fill a gap in both content on sqlpass.org and in the career progression of writing and participating in the community. We’re looking for detailed articles of 3000-4000 words. We’ve got copy and tech editors, just need you to do the upfront work of […]