Thought I'd post these notes based on feedback from the event organizers, wasn't able to attend myself due to scheduling constraints.

SQLSaturday #5 - Olympia. Around 130 attendees, everyone got fed, had one speaker cancel another fill in for him. Overall things went well, attendees happy with the results. Kudos to Greg & Russ for leading the charge, I know it's been a long road since they started planning back in July. You can also get a first hand account from speaker/attendee Brad McGehee on his blog at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/aloha_dba/archive/2008/10/11/sql-saturday-in-olympia-wa-pulls-in-crowd-of-over-130-dba-and-developers.aspx.

SQLSaturday #9 - Greenville, SC. Lead by Paul Waters, they had 75 attendees and also had several speakers have to cancel during the last week, but some good rearranging made things happen. Paul started much later than Olympia and felt the pain of that late start, but still got it done.

Now, to the future! 

As you may or may not know I've been building and evangelizing the SQLSaturday concept for over a year, back before we ran our first event in Orlando. We've been successful in Florida, but these two were the first that ran outside of Florida and definitely taught us some lessons about processes and tools we need, and the challenges of trying to be a distance coach. The goal is to give the event organizers a solid framework for the mundane stuff, let them focus on personalizing and driving a local event. We can do all the back office stuff in the world, just doesn't matter unless you have a few people that care enough to donate lots of time to a community event (my guess is close to 100 hours of time required for the various phases). Once Greg, Russ, and Paul take a week off I'm hoping I can get more detailed (and critical) feedback about how things went as far as our support (sorry, our support = me, Brian, & Steve) and the big question - will they try it again next year?

As we promised sometime back we gave each group the support they requested. For both events we donated polo shirts for the speakers, for Olympia we provided the liquidity needed to rent the event location (and most of that goes back into the pot thanks to their fund raising efforts). Brian & I both had originally planned to attend Olympia as well, but work got in the way of fun. The downside to that was Greg was definitely strugging to find speakers and that left a gap, so in our place we paid travel expenses for super SQL dude Joe Celko to attend/speak and do a couple sessions. These two events have led us to refine our model so that what we hope to continue offering is:

• Initial liquidity up to $2000, a loan that we hope will be repaid as they gather sponsors. If it's not repaid, the amount we have left to help other events is reduced and at some point may reach zero. One of the ideas we might pursue is seeing if some of the major tool vendors will trust us enough to donate some money to that effort, ultimately local events are also good marketing venues for them (and they'd still have to pay the local event to be a sponsor!)

• Offer a variety of items they can obtain from us, at our cost - items such as printed raffle tickets, name badges, raffle boxes, etc, and they will pay for out of their budget. Or they can do without, or find cheaper alternatives locally - we provide the PDF's of all that stuff at no cost.

• We see there is still a need for more management tools. The ability to upload adhoc files, better messaging templates, reminders and suggestions based on their timeline, capturing shirt sizes for volunteers, etc, etc. We're trying to find a week in Dec to invest in this part of the effort.

Hopefully it doesn't come across that we're trying to take credit for their success, because it only works due to their efforts. There's no doubt these events can be done without an existing web site and some of the other stuff, but we think over time leveraging that investment will reduce the cost of entry, where the biggest consideration is time. It's still early in the effort and as I've said before, it's going more slowly than I had hoped. That's probably a good thing because we learned a few new lessons and still have some to go. If you've got a group that wants to try an event for next year, please look at a date 5-6 months out and contact us, we'll offer whatever help we can.