The PASS election for the board of directors is going on right now. There are three seats open, and I'd encourage you to go vote as a part of the SQL Server community. If you've voted, great and thank you. If you haven't, go vote. 

If you couldn't last week, or didn't get a ballot, you may still be able to. There's information here: Board of Directors Election Update, but the short story is that you need to:

• Update your profile by Oct 5
• On Oct 7, a new set of emails will be sent to those people who have updated their profiles and not yet voted.
• Voting ends Oct 14.

It's pretty simple and voting takes a few minutes. You might want to spend a few minutes getting to know the candidates, and their profiles and infrormation are on the Candidates page, as well as more information on the Elections Discussion page.

Above all, tell someone else in the community. Ask them if they voted. Communicating these messages is hard, and it's easy to miss an email (or 6), a tweet, or just be buried in your own issue at work.

Tell a friend to vote!

Help keep this vibrant, exciting, helpful SQL Server community growning, and help us make PASS a better organization.

Also, 

CHANGE YOUR PASS PASSWORD

No, I'm not joking here or making a play on words. There has been a security hole in the PASS sites, all of them. If you haven't changed your password as of the time you see this, go do it. If you use this password anywhere else, any other site, go change that one as well. Right now.

Security isn't a joke. Set a good example. Go change password and tell friends to do the same.

Kudos to the Board of Directors

We had a lot of issues this week with the elections and this security issue. At the heart of the matter, in my opinion, is a communication issue. It's on both sides, but I'd say the burden to communicate better rests with the PASS organization and Board of Directors. That being said.

Kudos to President Thomas LaRock and the rest of the board of directors for getting together and doing the right thing. It would have been easy to do nothing, say the election is set. It would have been easy to quietly fix things, as many companies have done with their products. I heard this recently, and it struck me as a saying to keep in mind.

"It's never too late to do the right thing. Now is the time to do the right thing."

This decision made sense to me and it's in the spirit of community. It isn't something many governments would do, and it certainly isn't easy, but it's right. Thanks to the board for deciding that allowing everyone the chance to vote is important. Thanks for admitting there were issues, and thanks for fixing things.

Thanks for doing the right thing.

I look forward to you continuing to do the right thing in the future.

Everyone else, go vote.