I was actually travelling for most of July and some of that was on holiday with the family, the real family. That’s why I didn’t get a June update posted.

I don’t have anything much exciting to report. We’re finally getting data out of our Chapter database and can report some interesting stuff. We’ve added 29 new chapters in the fiscal year of 2015. 10 in the US, 12 in EMEA, 2 in LATAM and 5 in APAC. There’s a bunch more. Not sure when it’s all supposed to be published, but I’ll share some of it now, just ’cause. Our chapters logged 1,405 meetings in fiscal year 2015. That’s a pretty serious amount of training. Well done everyone! Thanks for all your work Carmen.

I missed the July board meeting (holiday, family, apologies, but priorities). The June meeting minutes are already published for those interested. It was my second in-person meeting with the board. The interesting things for me were the executive committee election and the discussion around SQL Rally. I recognize, at this point, it’s all old news, so I’m unsure what to add. I’m very excited about Adam Jorgensen being the president of PASS (although, I also would have been just as excited about having Tom LaRock for another term). SQL Rally… It was a good idea. Unfortunately it was not doing what it should have done, provide a mid-ranged event with minimal management needs. Rally was costing tons and tons of time & money on order to get put on. With the growth of SQL Saturday events, some of them having 1-2 days of pre-cons, it just didn’t make sense, to me, and evidently to much of the rest of the board, to keep going with SQL Rally when we could put on events just as large as Rally with less effort and cost to the organization. It’s these decisions that you elected everyone to make. The passion that everyone brought to the discussions on Rally, well, I think you elected the right people.

One other thing that came out of the meeting, I’m on the Nominations Committee for the upcoming Board Election. We’ve already had some meetings and we’re working on a process that was updated from last year (although we’ve already identified a couple of small changes we want to make for next year).  I won’t be able to report on what was said during these interviews with the candidates that will be coming up next. I will talk about the process around vetting the candidates and publishing our results. We’re going to publish the scores this time instead of just ordering the candidates (which means, you can order them based on the scores if you choose). I’m mixed on this. For example, I came in last in the rankings by last year’s Nomination Committee (not whining, stating a fact). I can’t say that I’d be real excited for everyone to see what the scores were. Heck, I’m not sure I want to know (and I don’t know) what everyone thought of me after the interview process. I can see how some might not be crazy about this. However, I suspect pretty strongly that everyone we interview is going to be clustered pretty tightly together, so I doubt anyone will complain too much. We’ll see.

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