Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

Its PASS V Day… you know what that means!

Allen Kinsel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:37:53 +0000

According to the official timeline today is the big day. No, it's not Valentines Day, but rather an even more important day. Today is the day when we, the PASS community, get to vote for and elect our new leaders. Today is the opening day of the PASS Board of Directors Election. This is our communities chance to have a say in the direction of the PASS organization.

Hopefully if you're taking the time to read this you are in the process of deciding which of the 5 candidates for the PASS Board of Directors you'd like to vote for. I want to thank you for being an educated PASS member and taking your valuable time to vet the candidates on their stances with relation to PASS. To hopefully help make that process easier, I'm going to aggregate all of my views about the PASS election at the bottom of this post.

I had hoped to come up with some terrific tagline that would convey what I bring to the table in this election but, I just couldn't make anything fit without it become 4 paragraphs so I decided to instead leave this picture since it does a better job.

At some point today you should get an email ballot from I would be honored If you would cast one of your votes for me. I'm running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference.

--Additional information about my candidacy --

5 changes I'd like to make while on the PASS board

How I want the Program Committee to evolve

The Evolution of the Program Committee

My answers to questions on the PASS Elections forum

Here are a few responses in particular

What will I do on day 1

2 Year plan, or 2 big ideas?

Information wants to be free

The infamous PASS election process

5 things I want to change while on the PASS Board

Allen Kinsel — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:32:33 +0000

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last 3 or 4 months about «why» I wanted to run for the PASS Board. I think I have finally come to the point where I can distill it down into a list of 5 specific things that I will work to make happen while on the PASS Board

5. Pass Summit location. I believe that we can reach more of our membership by moving the location of the annual summit. I like the idea of a 3 year rotation in Seattle.

4. Transparency. I plan to continue the push for as much release of information as the community wants. Particular things I'd like to see: full disclosure of individual BOD votes, more exposure of the Executive Committee «election process»

3. Better Chapter Support. We need to do a better job at giving our chapter leaders what they need, some of the most frequently requested things on the chapter «needs» list could be completed more easily than many think if I can succeed with item #1 on this list. I don't necessarily want to «own» chapter support but, I think I can provide help to this group, especially where it lends itself to my strength in PASS : speaker management.

2. Professionalism. I want our association to become more professional. That is to say, to begin offering more than education as the primary benefit to membership. I think there should be more benefit to being a PASS member than education & networking .

1. Community Involvement. I want to get our volunteers engaged in as many processes and tasks as possible. I've done what I consider to be a pretty good job at getting as many people involved in the program committee processes as reasonably possible, Id like to expand that same involvement into all areas of PASS. I wrote a lengthy reply on the PASS election forum about this subject, let me know what you think.

If you believe in these changes and you like how I communicate them, consider voting for me. I'm running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference. Click here to read about why I'm running.

What I'm doing to evolve the Program Committee next

Allen Kinsel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:11:04 +0000

Since I wrote about how we've been evolving the Program Committee in the past, I thought Id write about some of the ways we're trying to change the Program Committee in the future.

But first, I want to clarify something that someone else pointed out to me. When I write about the Program Committee, I always say «We». When working on something as complex as the program for the summit, it is necessary to work as a very cohesive team. This leadership team I am a part of is who makes all of the tactical decisions about the way we manage the education at the Summit. I always refer to «us» as «we» because I cannot (and will not) take all of the credit for putting the Summit education together. Without the team, the committee wouldn't be half of what it is. While I have been the overarching member of this team (the 1 they cant seem to run off) , the others are always there when we have work to do. Well, except Jeremiah, He's got this new gig where he's a turtle hunter or something....

We've been working hard over the last 2 years to bring some exciting (well, exciting to me anyway) changes to the program committee. A couple of these changes you should start seeing official announcements about any day now but, I decided to be a tease...

We're going to be opening another limited call for speakers for a new session type

There are 2 new session types coming (well, 1 is a bit old but, its new & shiney)

Some additional thoughts I have about evolving this process are in no particular order

Expand the use of Community Choice Sessions to include pre/post conferences(1 or maybe more), Id love to even be able to give those who vote for the precon that is selected a discount code to use on that precon.

have a separate speaker review team that will rate/rank speakers across all tracks and sessions, so we can cut down on the differing ratings per speaker.

Allow that team to reject speakers without considering abstracts if they dont meet some predefined criteria (no exact ideas on those criteria yet)

Have a Virtual Chapter sponsored session category. The initial idea is if a VC is active, (say has XX events a year) we allot them 1 speaker slot that they can then award to one of their best speakers (as they see fit within some reasonable framework).

Use the session evaluation tool for all PASS events (local, chapter, sqlsat, summit, rally)

Expand the feedback for speakers when we dont accept their presentation at the Summit. Allow the review teams to leave free form comments, as well as a standardized reasons we're using now

The long evolution of the PASS Program Committee

Allen Kinsel — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:50:28 +0000

It all had to begin somewhere

I joined the Program Committee in late 2006; I spent the first 2 years working on the DBA track teams selecting abstracts. I have spent a good deal of time working on the technology (vendors) of the Summit (the software we use to manage speakers, room assignments, itinerary planner, etc.). After going through several demo's and actually attempting to use two different software packages, I started pushing for PASS to build our own software. We are paying a (small) fortune for what we use now, the only reason I can figure is that its much more robust than what we need for PASS. Last year I worked with PASSHQ to put together a project plan for PASS to build a new technology platform to manage the Summit. This year David with PASS HQ has started delivering on parts of the software. Once this is in place and we're not changing software every year/other year, we should be able to focus more on the process, and less on the new software.

Prior to last year, Pre/post conference sessions (AKA precons) and Spotlight sessions were 100% invite only, and the guidelines for who was allowed to present these sessions was never published outside of the committee. Beginning with last year, we worked to publish guidelines for who was eligible to present precon sessions. In publishing the requirements list for who could present an all day precon session we opened up the call for precons to include anyone who met the requirements. At the same time we opened up spotlight invitations to competition, where we invited more speakers than we had slots for in hopes of raising the caliber of these sessions. We also began using an easy to understand formula for who gets invited to present spotlight sessions.

In this same time frame we reached out to many experts and asked for help developing a speaker resource page. Prior to this there was no real information on PASS's website documenting what it takes to write good abstracts, or get selected as a speaker. We have pulled together quite a few resources to help develop speakers, including webcasts and sample abstracts, etc.

Growing bigger better speakers

I have blogged quite a bit about growing the pool of speakers and we have made some very good steps in the right direction in this space. There were two fundamental changes I worked into the program committee. The first was adding a «speaker bureau» option to the speakers contract. This will allow PASS (where the speakers agreed) to hand off speaker info and abstracts to the local chapters that the speakers are near, which will hopefully facilitate some interaction between the chapter leaders and some local aspiring speakers they may not know about. There is still work to do to build and enrich the process around this sharing of information back out to the chapters but the first (most important) step has been taken. I also worked it into the summit speaker contracts that we would release aggregate scores to the other speakers presenting so they could know where they stood compared to their peers. This was decided as a good first step in open conversations generated by the discussion in this post

Lots of internal Changes

This year a few things changed internally within the program committee, I separated the BI tracks review teams to match the fact that we now have 2 BI tracks, I also added an extra person to the DBA track team because, well, their workload increases every year and they could use some additional help. I created a true team of 3 to review precons and spotlights instead of the mgmt group doing that work. But, by far for me the largest change was getting Lori Edwards involved in the leadership of the program committee. Initially the idea was for her to get a team of task based volunteers who could work on some of the extra technology that the Program committee needed in order to work more effectively. The first thing I handed her was to take the monstrosity of an excel spreadsheet I had containing every speakers session evaluation since 2005 (when I first got a copy) and make it into a proper database, and get some reporting from it. After some discussions, we decided to build this as a system to hold ALL speaker evals for PASS or SQL Saturday, or actually ANY SQL presentation, the idea is when its finished if you have a speaker at any SQL event you can accept online evaluations and the speakers will get better feedback in one place. In addition, the organizers of PASS events will have better information as well. This task is still in process, but the first deliverable was a standard report of speakers and their evaluation scores and this was available for this years Program committee. Somewhere along the way, Lori became more and more involved with all of the bits and pieces of what it takes to run the program committee. Her involvement in these things has enabled me to reach out and not just do the same old thing for the Summit this year.

More evolution

This year I continued to push to evolve the program committee in several ways. One of the changes most visible to PASS membership was the Community Choice Sessions. Like all great ideas I'm not exactly sure where this idea was born, but I worked with people across the PASS organization to get this done. I wrote about the process a couple of times as it was coming into being. After involving over 1100 members, I would say this was a great success for PASS, myself and the Program group.

We are planning on taking the evaluation system that Lori and her team are working on and put it into use for the first time at this years Summit. In doing so we have planned to offer a new type of session that I've written about before. This will be what we're tentatively calling «best of sessions» where we take the session with the highest evaluation on Tuesday and ask that speaker to present the same session on Wednesday, repeating the same process for those who speak on Wednesday, asking them to present the same session again on Thursday. This should allow the BEST content at the summit to be seen by the most attendees.

It hasn't been all fun and games

This evolution and opening of the program process hasn't been all BACON and index seeks, there has been more than one change on this list that have caused many questions, and in some cases very involved discussions. We haven't always gotten everything right, but heck I'm happy that I can say I think we got it mostly right. There is always room for improvement and more to do to continue to evolve these processes,

I received my diagnosis

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:15:57 +0000

Luckily, I didn't have to pay a single thing for it.

Brent Ozar unwittingly made the diagnosis the other day in a comment on Stuart Ainsworth's blog (I shortened it a bit)

Since I have served on both of those PASS Committee's (Program Committee as a leader) I must be insane.

I mean, no one willingly jumps in front of that many bullets, at least not for long. Whether he meant it or not, Brent is right though, when you put yourself into one of these types of committee's you truly are opening yourself to all sorts of bullets. This sort of «target practice» has been one of the toughest things for me to learn how to deal with as a PASS volunteer. The good news though, is that its amazing what it will do for you professionally, its one thing when your «favorite» developer is firing Air soft bullets in disagreement with you, its quite another when leaders of the SQL community who you have a huge amount of respect for start firing .50cal's.

Many of my companies developers (several hundred total) have commented to me in the last few years that I have «mellowed» out a bit, a few of them have laughed and blamed it on old age, but in reality, I know its a side effect of serving in very public roles within the PASS Community.

PASS Summit Community Choice Session results revealed

Allen Kinsel — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:53:21 +0000

This year the Program Committee decided to try something different to increase community involvement with the abstract selection process for the annual summit. We decided to allow any registered PASS members to vote on the final 4 community sessions to be presented at the Summit in Seattle this year. With our historically low turnout in surveys of our membership, I turned to the team at PASSHQ with a simple question about whether or not we could use the same voting tool that is in place for the upcoming Board of Directors election. Considering our surveys have traditionally resulted in 300-500 results , at the time I put a personal goal on the survey response rate of 500, anything greater than that and I would consider the time and energy It took to put it together a win, anything less and well, we wouldn't be doing any more exploring in the use of public voting for Summit Sessions.

I'm VERY pleased to say that by all indications, the voting process was a great success, sure we will always aim to do better but, for now, having over 1100 people vote on what they want to see at the Summit is a huge win for PASS as an organization. In the App Dev group, the winner was declared by 2 votes. 2 votes out of 600 is pretty outstanding, if you didn't take the time and vote, you could have been the vote that swayed the result!! Don't miss your chance next time!! The winning sessions can be found here.

I want to take the time to thank each and every member of the awesome PASS Community who voted. As well as Jeremiah Peschka (Twitter|Blog) & Lori Edwards (Twitter|Blog) for dealing with my crazy ideas on putting this together, and keeping me in check. Andy Warren (Twitter|Blog) for helping me get the voting tool he built for pass working for this use. Id also like to give a huge thanks to Hannes, Wesley and Elena at PASSHQ for helping bring all of this to PASS (pun intended)

Shadows Rock, Filtering Platform not so much!

Allen Kinsel — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:15:34 +0000

RDP remote control (shadowing) of multiple sessions is a great way to allow geographically separated teams to work on the same Server console. You can do this from task manager

Control your co-workers!

Today I had a new install of windows 2008 that was rejecting the attempts at remote control, the error was »remote control failed», nothing was logged in the System or Application event logs. In the Security event log was only one error: «The Windows Filtering Platform has blocked a bind to a local port»

After plenty of fiddling and making sure there was no »firewall» or reason for the filtering platform to be enabled, I came across this command I never knew existed «shadow»

Apparently whatever had the filtering platform angry and blocking access was ok with that simple command. So in this case going to a command window and running «shadow 3» worked perfectly, I could once again see both terminals and the windows filtering platform allowed me to actually work, instead of impeding me at every turn.

The Windows Filtering Platform on Server 2008 and 2008 R2 has been the culprit more times than I can count lately when the «gremlins» are inhabiting our servers, If only there were a way you could turn it off totally, but I guess that's sort of like Internet Explorer, it cant be unbundled from the OS.

Dont forget to vote for the PASS Summit Community Choice sessions

Allen Kinsel — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:01:46 +0000

If you are a PASS member, on August 3rd you should have gotten an email inviting you to vote on four of the sessions to be presented at the 2010 PASS Summit.

There are some great sessions up for selection, You can review them here.

If you havent voted yet, be on the lookout today for a reminder. You should get an email with personal links to vote, it will only take a few minutes of your time and your opinion counts!

If you've already voted, I want to thank you, if not please take this time to do so. If we can get enough community interest in this process I can see it growing and morphing into something more so while your opinion counts on the actual selections, your vote can also help shape the future way PASS does session selections.

More on PASS Summit Community Choice sessions & a general PASS update

Allen Kinsel — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:37:06 +0000

More on PASS Summit Community Choice sessions

Last week I posted about letting the PASS membership select 4 of the Community sessions to be presented at this year's North American Summit. As with most things I've touched lately, the devil is in the details. I have been working with PASS HQ quite a lot to get this process all ironed out. As of today, We are expecting the emails with all of the details to go out in the first part of next week. One of the last minute *details* we've had to account for is related to asking community members to vote in the 4 different categories, it turns out we aren't able to require it to work that way. The short reason why is because of the way the PASS voting solution is designed (remember, its actually designed for voting in the upcoming BOD election) We cant have 4 separate categories and allow you to vote only in 1 each. While we are still separating the sessions into categories and asking you to vote on each one separately, we wont be able to enforce it. As it turns out, its not that big of a change and even if our members choose to cast their votes all in the same category, their votes will simply be cancelled out since we are going to choose the highest vote getter in each of the categories. So start watching those email boxes for more detailed information!

Other PASS goodness

Summit Selection Process follow-up meetings, since shortly after the community selection process finished, I have been on phone conferences with the selection teams for feedback about the entire selection process. These meetings have been going great, and overall the feedback was extremely positive, both about the process and the volunteer experience in general. That's not to say the team members weren't critical of a few hiccups we experienced but overall it was good. In these meetings nothing was off-limits, and I got some GREAT new ideas that should really improve a few of the key procedural pieces of the process. Many of the technological limitations and issues we knew about going into the selection but, with all the timelines, we just couldn't get changes made quick enough. Since PASS is building a summit management tool for 2011, we should have many of those technology issues behind us for the start of next year's selection process. All in all, It always helps us to get feedback about the selection as soon as its over while its still fresh in everyone's minds. the #1 piece of feedback that kept recurring is: Communication is key. What I have taken from this is that even if you think everyone's on the same page, its often ok to ask again if there are any questions, better safe than sorry.

Microsoft Speaker selections, Ive been doing this for the last 4 years and this year was the first year where I felt like we (the community team) have been actively engaged with the Microsoft Selection process, we're still trying to figure out how all the different pieces fit together and where we can add value and community feedback into their processes. So far things are working better than I expected but not as good as I'd like. Seems to be the story of my life these days!!! All of this is great news for the community since it will produce a better Summit but, its been bad news for myself and the other volunteers working on it. For me, being the pseudo ring leader, Its just 1 more thing added to an already full plate this time of year. From the day the call to speakers is announced to the date the summit actually starts, is when things get pretty hectic with the Program Committee, there are always a few «regularly scheduled items» that have to be completed by certain deadlines not to mention the things that go BOOM. The regular scheduled stuff isnt a big deal, the BOOM's on the other hand, lets just say Disaster Recovery planning isn't just for Databases or Computers, it is valuable in most any important process.

Community Choice Sessions at the PASS Summit 2010

Allen Kinsel — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:15:58 +0000

Its Still Alive

Yes this blog is still alive! I recently had some hard decisions to make with regards to what I needed to drop in order to get at least 3 hours of sleep in a night. And unfortunately for the 3 of you that read my blog, it was the blog that lost that battle. I should be getting back in the habit of writing now that the biggest crunch time for the program committee at the PASS Summit is over.

What happened?

Short answer : The PASS Summit speaker selection process. (Program Committee Manager role)

Longer yet short answer: The PASS Summit program committee leadership position is a very involved volunteer position, taking more hours of my time than I can count (Just ask my wife!!). For the last month the 4 amigo's (Jeremiah Peschka (Blog|Twitter) , Lori Edwards(Blog|Twitter), Elena Sebastiano (PASSHQ), and myself) have been working tirelessly towards the first goal of announcing the community sessions. With that out of the way the PASS work doesn't stop, we get to do other «fun» stuff. Innovate with PASS if you like, because that's what we're going to try to do!!

Community Choice Sessions

Ive talked about this before and I'm happy to say, after quite a bit of work in ironing out the details, it is going to be a reality. We're in the process of building the pages, but I can already say that 20 Speakers are going to get a second chance at being selected to present one of their sessions at the Summit. In order to make this happen, we went over the summit track selections, looking at alternates first, then other sessions that were ranked highly by the review teams. We collected 20 sessions that we thought could fill in gaps in the educational offering, or that we thought deserved another look. Essentially, we took the work the selection teams did and distilled it down to give the community 5 session choices in each of 4 different groups

We split up the sessions into 4 groups, 1 each for the tracks AD/BI/DBA and then added a fourth as a sort of menagerie containing sessions across all 4 tracks. We plan on using the «PASS voting booth» to facilitate the voting in each category, so each «registered PASS Member» will have a vote for a session in each of the categories. At the end of the voting period, the session in each category that has the most votes will be confirmed & put in the lineup to be presented at the 2010 PASS Summit in Nov.

Next week we should have all of the details finalized and Ill write more about it then but, for now be on the lookout for an email from PASS with more details about how you can help directly shape the sessions at the 2010 Summit.