Time once again for another edition of T-SQL Tuesday!  What’s that, you say?  Early?  Why yes, indeed.  Due to the potential schedule of conflict of PASS’s Summit 2011 occurring on the second Tuesday of October (the normal date for T-SQL Tuesday), I’ve gotten special permission to bump it up a week. 

To participate in this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, your post must go live between midnight UTC on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 and midnight UTC on Wednesday, October 5.

Your post needs to link back to this blog, and if you use the image, anchor it to this post.  Make sure you leave a comment or a trackback to this post (so I can find it later, when I write up the summary).

Topic d’jour?  JOINS (I’m in a fundamentals mood lately).  Note that I also like creative and esoteric posts, so if you can find a way to apply SQL as a metaphorical language for community activity, I’ll read it and enjoy it.  If you just want to tell me in a simple fashion the difference between a HASH and MERGE join, I’m cool with that, too.

Do me a favor, though, and please spread the word about the early date.  Looking forward to reading your submissions.

Here’s the rundown (copied and pasted from the original, with some notes below):

Professional

Technical Skills

• I want to learn something new every month.  My goal is to tackle something challenging, and be able to understand the ins and outs of it within 30 days.  For example, I want to finish tackling XML (including XSD’s) in SQL Server. 

I think I’m doing OK on this one; I haven’t really done great this month, but I have spent a little time each month working on something new.

• I want to upgrade my certifications by the end of the year; I’ve been dancing around the MCITP exams for a while, and I need to finish them.

Spent a little time studying, but I need to get on this.

Presentation

• I want to make at least 6 technical presentations by the end of the year; last year, I managed to eke out 8, but given some of the recent changes in my personal life (see below), I think 6 is reasonable.

I have two presentations scheduled for SQL Saturday 70 next month.

• I will blog at least once a month about some technical topic (see the first bullet point under technical skills).

See the above point; as I learn, I blog.  I did miss the T-SQL Tuesday blog for Feb (which makes me sad).

Management

• I will understand the SCRUM methodology, and learn how to implement it with my team at work.  Although I’m not a team leader, I AM the Senior Database Architect, and I need to code less, and teach more.  This is my year to do so.

I’ve done this; I’m moving on to something larger. 

Personal

Health

• I’m getting married again this year, and I want to look good for my new wife.  I also want to avoid long-term health issues.  I was losing weight last year (until I started dating), and I want to get back on track.  I’d like to lose 50 lbs by October.

Started Weight Watchers and have lost about 10 pounds so far.  Have tapered off a bit, and I need to get back on this bandwagon.

• I have apnea, and I’ve been horrible about using my CPAP on a regular basis.  I will use it regularly.

How about irregularly?

• I need to exercise more, so I will find 20 minutes a day to do SOMETHING, even if it’s just walking around the office for 20 minutes.

Blech.  I did OK for about two days.

• I will drink at least 8 glasses of water per day.

Does Diet Coke count as water?  Sigh; it looks like I’m not doing so hot in the Health area.

Spiritual

• I’ve slacked off in my religious activities; my faith was nourished by church attendance during my divorce, and I need to start growing again.  I will find a new church in the next two months (my old church is too far to drive on a regular basis), and become a regular attendee.

Checked out a church; didn’t like it.

• I choose to absorb the goodness from people who love me, and I will reject the poison from those who do not.  I will focus on the important things in life (like my kids, and my future bride), and worry less about the unimportant things (like who’s mowing the grass).

Mixed results on this; while I think I do a great job at spending time with my kids and my future bride, I’m still struggling with ways to handle conflict in a positive fashion.  My strategy now is direct confrontation, rather than continuing to tap-dance around issues.

Social

• I will listen more to my children, my family, and my friends.  I will find ways to let them know I love them.

See above.

• I will nurture my own friendships; while I love my fiance’s friends and family, I want to bring more to the table than just me.

Need to do better about this.

Financial

• My divorce pulled me way off course.  While I’m a long way from being out of debt, I will continue to make strides in that area.  I will pay off at least one credit card ahead of schedule.

Not really making a lot of headway here;  this one may have to wait until my fiancee and I combine households (thus saving on rent payments).

• I will save more; I plan to find ways to cut costs (like taking advantage of coupons, and eating out less).

Ditto.

There you have it; a mixed bag.  I think I’m making some positive steps in the right direction, but I’ve still got a long way to go.

• Andy Leonard
• Grant Fritchey
• Robert Matthew Cook
• Mike Walsh

All of these posts have great ideas, and have influenced my thinking on my subject; I’ve had conversations with most of these authors about some of the finer points of the direction that PASS should take over the last year at Summit, SQL Saturdays, email, etc; the ideas that I’m going to post below are probably not too dissimilar than their thoughts (although we probably differ on some on the implementations of those ideas).

Heading off in a general direction…

Although Andy W. specifically asked for a 3-year plan, I think part of the problem with PASS is that the long-term vision is unclear.  There’s a big debate about whether or not PASS is a community organization, a business serving that community, or something else that’s not been well-defined.  Additionally, PASS struggles with its domain of influence; the organization is viewed as being U.S.-centric by most members outside of the states, and inside the states, the continued reliance on Microsoft’s presence in Seattle makes the organization seem distant to local users.  What should PASS be?

In a conversation with Andy W. a few months ago, I proposed that PASS should borrow from some of the great evangelistic traditions of Western civilization (I was originally thinking of a non-religious version of the five fold ministry of the early Christian church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers), and Andy threw out the word “guild”.  I like that concept; PASS should be a guild, providing training both in terms of learning about the tools (SQL Server and associated products) and growth in the guild (moving from a student to a master).  Guilds are both a community of learners, and a powerful force of influence; where the Summit goes, Microsoft should follow (instead of the other way around).  I think this thought echoes Grant’s call:

Get the word out that if you want training this is the place to be. If you want to be a trainer, this is the place to start, if you are a trainer, this is where you grow you brand.

Of course, that’s a long-term definitional goal ; in the short term, I see three areas for improvement.

Things to do in the next three years…

1. Have an election process that’s deemed fair and reliable by the majority of the membership. 

I applaud PASS for taking steps in this regard.  I obviously spent a great deal of time discussing this over the last 10 months, and I’ve arrived at a very different place than either Andy Leonard or Mike Walsh (I believe in a strong Nominating Committee with an opaque application process; Andy has called to abandon it altogether, and Mike believes in a simple pass-or-fail review of credentials).  While our viewpoints on the actual implementation may differ, I think we can all agree that PASS will continue to lack credibility if the method by which organizational power is attained is not supported by the constituency.    PASS needs to get the election process stabilized and supported before the next election.

2. Adopt the User Groups as an extension of the organization, rather than just partners in community.

The PASS Chapter model is essentially a good one; there is no better way (in my opinion) to reach SQL Server professionals interested in building their careers than through the User Groups.  Unfortunately, as Mike (and others) have pointed out, the loose affiliation between PASS and the chapters have left many chapter leaders questioning what does PASS really do for the chapters?  That needs to change.

Chapters should be the local arms of PASS; attendees to a chapter meeting should leave every meeting thinking that they are getting a monthly shot (albeit a smaller dosage) of the same knowledge that they get from a PASS SQLSaturday, a PASS SQLRally, and a PASS Summit.  Chapters should feel interconnected; as a chapter leader in Atlanta, I should know what topic TJay Belt is discussing in Utah, or what Roy Ernest is covering in Curaco.   I should feel confident (as should they) that I have access to the same resources for educating my members (including trained, professional speakers as well as online materials) as any other chapter.

Chapters should also be given the tools necessary to recruit new members to the guild, both those members of the community with lots of experience with SQL Server (and little-to-none with PASS) as well as those members of the community who are still figuring out what a clustered index is.  I realize that this is a huge task to take on in 3 years, but the initial groundwork must be laid; chapters need to feel that they are part of a larger organization, and they should be embraced as siblings (not distant cousins).

As a sidebar, I should note that while PASS chapters should not replace the online initiatives that PASS has recently invested in (the blogosphere and social networks), they should be the primary focus.   From my own personal perspective, I’ve recently discovered that as I’ve become less “plugged in” (changes in my personal life as well as new corporate firewall policies have prevented my social networking),  it’s been harder to stay invested in PASS and the SQL community.  For example, I missed the recent call for volunteers for Program Committee members; I’ve also missed quite a few calls for bloggers (like T-SQL Tuesday).  There needs to be better connectedness between “meatspace” (a term I borrowed from Brent Ozar) and the online community.

3.  Invest in the IT structure at HQ.

We’re an organization of information technology professionals, and as far as I know, we have a staff of 2 IT guys (a developer and an admin).  If PASS is going to be the essential tool for the SQL Server Professional, then the organization needs to build an IT infrastructure that can support community connectedness, the sharing of essential information, networking between members, and training resources to move passive members to active masters of their craft.  I am not sure what that would take, but I think the speaker bureau (as well as a speaker training program) is a good start.  PASS doesn’t need to be a SQLServerpedia or a SQL Server Central, but it does need to provide its membership with an awareness of what good SQL Server resources are, and how they should be used in the educational path of the member.

Summing Up…

As I said before, I’m envisioning PASS as a guild for SQL Server professionals; guilds have members with varying skill levels (from apprentice to master craftsman), and the goal of the guild is to train its members not only in the tools they use, but also in the ways of the guild.  We’ve got a long way to go, but I think we have some basic steps we need to master, and soon.

I’ve had other epiphanies in my career, such as the time when my ethical standards were a little higher than my employers; when I got sent home by a GM after a discussion over my responsibilities, I started polishing my resume.   I was doing it wrong by working for the wrong company.

Recently, I’ve begun to realize that I’m not living up to my full potential in my career.  I’ve spent the last several years building an enterprise solution for my company that has become the core product of that company.  It’s a good product, and I’m proud of it.  However, like many small companies that have grown up fast,  our company is built on a complex ecosystem of ever-changing goals and feature requests.  We built a system based on assumptions, and we’ve become one of the leaders of our industry because we’re often the first to deliver a product for a niche market.  Many of the assumptions we made didn’t pan out, and the applications we’ve built have slowly degenerated into a mass of tangled wire and unrealistic expectations.  I realized this as I’ve struggled to add a new feature and retrofit it into this existing solution; it’s taking more and more time to solve development problems because we’re not sure what features are still being used by some employee in a dark corner of the building.

As I was rewriting a stored procedure for the fifth time trying to eke out a few more milliseconds of performance, I realized that I was thinking like an engineer.  Engineers find creative solutions to problems in a very hands-on way; they worry about wiring things together so that they work, and they work well.  Engineers are worried about the microcosm; as every geek’s favorite engineer (Scotty from Star Trek) would say “In four hours, the ship blows up.”  That’s pretty straightforward; under condition x, outcome y is to be expected in a certain amount of time.

The problem?  My title says Architect.  I’m supposed to be thinking about the big picture, not just how a couple of applications are wired together.  I’m supposed to understand (and enforce) the rules about how events become data, and how data becomes information.  I should be more concerned with defining the specifications for our system than trying to figure out this damned stored procedure (for the fifth time).  Maybe we shouldn’t even have this particular stored procedure; maybe with a little tweaking, we could eliminate the problem altogether.

So what does this mean for me?  Well, as part of my New Year’s resolutions, I’ve been determined to learn something new every month.  This month, I’ve been focused on what does it mean to be a Data Architect, and I’ve been trying to find a little time every day to transform myself from an engineer to an architect.  I’m not going to master all of these subjects at once, but here’s my working list (from high-level goals to specific action items).  I expect this list to evolve, but it’s a start.

High Level Goal: A Data Architect needs to establish the standards for information and data in the enterprise.

• I need to document the information architecture of our division of the company, using a standard data flow diagram notation.  I need to spend some time daily refreshing my memory on that notation.
• I need spend time with employees throughout the organization, discovering what the business entities are, and what the vocabulary for those entities are. 
• After discovery, I need to publish a standard vocabulary document and data-dictionary, showing how we capture that information today:
  • I need to propose changes to our business vocabulary, and
  • I need to propose changes to our database schema to standardize our notation.

High Level Goal: A Data Architect needs to understand the nature of the enterprise’s information on all levels: physical, logical, and procedural.

• I need to talk to our production DBA’s an understand how our database servers are set up physically, including the clustering structure, the drive arrays, the SAN, etc.
• I need to talk to our engineers to understand how data gets to the databases.
• I need to talk to our product owners to understand what information they want from the data, and what’s the best way to deliver it.

High Level Goal: A Data Architect needs to recommend the best architecture for information management, including a plan on how to get there from here.

• I need to refresh my memory on all aspects of SQL Server, not just the parts I use on a daily basis.
• After discovery, I need to recommend ways to improve efficiency in our data capture processes.
• I need to listen to all voices in the organization, even those I don’t normally agree with.  I can’t afford to throw away good ideas simply because I don’t always like the originator of those ideas.

More to come, but this is what I’ve been working on so far this month (February 2011).

So tell us: what techie resolutions have you been pondering, and why?  Are you heading for a certification? An award? Are you looking to pick up CLR because that guy at the Summit said it’s “bitchin’”? Go crazy…

I’ve already covered a lot of my techie resolutions in this post, but here’s a recap, with some expanded thoughts:

• I vow to learn something new every month.  I’ve already started on this one, but I need to keep working on it.   For example, I’m working on XML and XQuery this month; next month, I’m thinking SSIS.
• I vow to be more involved in the technical community.  I’ve slipped out of tweeting (mostly because it’s blocked on our corporate network); I will do more.  I also want to read more blogs, as well as do a LOT more blogging myself.  For example, I plan to participate in every T-SQL Tuesday for 2011.  I also plan to present at least 6 times this year.
• I will earn my MCITP: Database Developer certification this year.  Been meaning to do it; just haven’t invested the time to do so.

On a personal note, I want to tackle a few more technical projects that have been hovering over my head:

• I want to do more with pictures and videos.  I have a nice digital camera, and a nice Flip video camera, but I don’t do squat with them.  I’m horrible about leaving them behind when I travel; I will use them as needed.
• My fiancée is an iPod user (like 90% of the world); I am not (I have an Archos).  Merging our music into iTunes is not going to be fun (especially since I’ve never used it), but in the long run, it’ll be the right thing to do for us.
• I want to work smarter, not harder, so I can play more.  There’s lots of little services out there (like Remember the Milk, Yodlee.com, Google calendars, etc) which will help me manage my life on the move (shuttling between my apartment, my fiancée’s house, and my office).

Short, sweet, but at least it’s submitted

Professional

Technical Skills

• I want to learn something new every month.  My goal is to tackle something challenging, and be able to understand the ins and outs of it within 30 days.  For example, I want to finish tackling XML (including XSD’s) in SQL Server.
• I want to upgrade my certifications by the end of the year; I’ve been dancing around the MCITP exams for a while, and I need to finish them.

Presentation

• I want to make at least 6 technical presentations by the end of the year; last year, I managed to eke out 8, but given some of the recent changes in my personal life (see below), I think 6 is reasonable.
• I will blog at least once a month about some technical topic (see the first bullet point under technical skills).

Management

• I will understand the SCRUM methodology, and learn how to implement it with my team at work.  Although I’m not a team leader, I AM the Senior Database Architect, and I need to code less, and teach more.  This is my year to do so.

Personal

Health

• I’m getting married again this year, and I want to look good for my new wife.  I also want to avoid long-term health issues.  I was losing weight last year (until I started dating), and I want to get back on track.  I’d like to lose 50 lbs by October.
• I have apnea, and I’ve been horrible about using my CPAP on a regular basis.  I will use it regularly.
• I need to exercise more, so I will find 20 minutes a day to do SOMETHING, even if it’s just walking around the office for 20 minutes.
• I will drink at least 8 glasses of water per day.

Spiritual

• I’ve slacked off in my religious activities; my faith was nourished by church attendance during my divorce, and I need to start growing again.  I will find a new church in the next two months (my old church is too far to drive on a regular basis), and become a regular attendee.
• I choose to absorb the goodness from people who love me, and I will reject the poison from those who do not.  I will focus on the important things in life (like my kids, and my future bride), and worry less about the unimportant things (like who’s mowing the grass).

Social

• I will listen more to my children, my family, and my friends.  I will find ways to let them know I love them.
• I will nurture my own friendships; while I love my fiance’s friends and family, I want to bring more to the table than just me.

Financial

• My divorce pulled me way off course.  While I’m a long way from being out of debt, I will continue to make strides in that area.  I will pay off at least one credit card ahead of schedule.
• I will save more; I plan to find ways to cut costs (like taking advantage of coupons, and eating out less).

Anyway, there you have it: my New Year’s resolutions for 2011.  May it be a good year for all.

It’s been wonderful being in a healthy relationship with someone after having lived through a unhealthy one; my fiancée’ actually LIKES me, and that’s made all the difference.   When I’m with her, I feel good about myself, and when I’m away, I can’t wait to spend time with her (hopefully, that explains my absence from blogging a bit).

However, I have kids with my ex, which means that I can’t completely break away from my past; I love my children, and in order to do what’s best for them, I’ve had to continue holding my tongue and restraining my anger when their mom and I disagree.  I would have thought that I would be a master of that by now, but it continues to be a struggle for me.  Anger is a seductive emotion, in some ways more so than love.  It’s far too easy to dwell on the hurts and pains caused by the other person, and to either lash out in revenge or obsess about the misdeeds of the other.  While both of those reactions are normal, neither of them will feed the spirit for any length of time.  So, I’m writing this post to draw a line in the sand; I refuse to live in the shadow of anger any longer.  I will not dwell on the perceived injustices caused by others, but will instead find ways to enjoy life. 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure that I will continue to encounter situations where anger is justified (and I plan on getting angry when those times arise).  However, I refuse to continue looking for those things that offend me; I choose to live my life filled with love and laughter.  Life is too short to waste dwelling in darkness.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year; may your lives be blessed with peace, prosperity, and challenges to grow.

Thank you.

“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken.  Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning?  Please explain your thoughts?”

Learning from the experience…

I don’t want to keep rehashing the past, because it’s been done (here, here, here, and here, to name a few; if you want a LOT more reading material, the elections site has a bunch of blog entries).   While there are lots of lessons to be learned, and ideas to be discussed, I think there are two key points that are not stressed enough:

1. Our discourse as a community has been healthy, and
2. Nobody involved in the process has walked away clean.

For the first point, I think we’ve been able to keep our disagreements civil; there have been some comments made from several key contributors to the discussion that have been more cutting than others, and I have said some things that I should have kept to myself, but all in all, I don’t think we’ve burned any bridges that can’t be rebuilt.   The only lingering meme that continues to bother me is the occasional “community-vs.-PASS” theme that is implied in some of the discussions; I’ll talk more about why that bothers me in a bit, but I fear we too easily fall into the trap of needing to define an invisible “Them” to be an antithesis to our “We”.   We is Them, and They are We.

The second point was driven home to me like a dagger to the heart in a response from Andy Warren to a dialogue in the comments section of Brent Ozar’s post on the issue:

Agreeing to disagree is seldom satisfying, but often necessary. I’m entirely biased about my views on this, but I think it’s easy to forget the pain that continues along with this discussion. Replace the name of SJ with yours, and imagine how it would feel to be left off the slate (fairly, unfairly or otherwise), and then have a conversation continue that seems to imply a great failure during the interview, but no details emerge. Do you defend yourself or lay low? What if you allow the inner details to be published, but they are not?

We don’t agree on the way things worked out. Ok. I think we should let things heal a little more, then have the values and process conversation that we should have had last year – one that I’ve admitted I should have helped to make happen. Yell at me. Yell at the process. But I think we’re at the point where we leave a good man to tend his wounds and we try to do better next year, or we have the entire conversation and let the chips fall where they way on each side. I vote for moving forward.

Not my place to tell you not to talk about it, and much of this has been good conversation. But please remember my friend is not an abstraction. Actually, I wish I could say that better. I know that you don’t he is an abstraction, but I’m not sure that this conversation, right now, helps any of us.

I’ve been so busy defending what I perceived to be attacks on the character of the Nom Com or the quality of my work that I’ve forgotten what it must be like to be in Steve’s place, and for that I’m truly sorry.   I don’t regret my choice to point out what I think are inaccurate statements about the process, but I should have tempered my comments with more grace than I did.  That being said, I think we all need to step back and realize that nobody was completely happy with this year’s election process; obviously, the controversy was not a desired outcome by anyone on the Nom Com, the Board, or the membership at large.  So how do we fix the process moving forward?

Is the process irreparably broken?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer:  I think if you look at any business that has an electable Board of Directors, the nominations process is similar; the Board appoints a committee to find qualified candidates, and then votes to approve or reject the slate.   The elections process should be simple, but fair; I don’t think that a Board of an organization need be run like the federal government (with election cycles dictating workflow). That being said, I think there are lots of opportunities to tweak the process, and learn from our mistakes.

Tweak 1: Standardize the qualifications for a Director

I think PASS made strides this year, but there should be very specific minimum requirements for a seat at the table.  Andy Leonard and K. Brian Kelley both made excellent points about the inadequacy of using a ranking system to evaluate certain concrete measures like Education and References.  If we must use a ranking system, then the criteria for the ranks need to be carefully defined, like so:

Applicant must have a Bachelor’s Degree (or equivalent University degree).
Add 1 point for a Master’s Degree in any subject.
Add 1 point for a Doctorate Degree in any subject.

Please note that the above example is merely intended to illustrate specific ranking criteria; the definition of Education itself warrants more discussion than I have time for in this post.

Experience with PASS is another great example of a objective measure that needs standard ranking; how long have you been a member?  What volunteer roles have you performed?  Is experience as a chapter leader more or less valuable than experience on the Program Committee?  Whatever standards are chosen, they should be well-defined and applied evenly from year to year; if an applicant doesn’t change their behavior from year to year (i.e., an applicant with little PASS experience in year 1 doesn’t get involved in year 2), they should have the same score.

Tweak 2: Transparent Application, Opaque Interviews, Translucent Board

Applications should be made available to the public, as well as the ranking using the standardized questionnaire described above; the general members of PASS should feel confident that the scoring system used to evaluate an application reflects the applicant’s ability to meet the minimum requirements.

However, I think that discussions within the Nominations Committee, including interviews with the applicants, should remain opaque: a black box.  I know others think that the Nom Com should be completely transparent, but I think that the job of the Nom Com is to probe areas beyond the minimum qualification, and in order to do so, the members of that group need the ability to ask questions that may not be appropriate for general consumption.  I think this protects both the applicants and the volunteer interviewers (what if I, as a volunteer, were to ask a really stupid question?  Should I be vilified on the Internet by the membership?).  But here’s the rub: the interviews need to be recorded.

The interviews should NEVER be released to the general membership, but once the slate has been presented to the Board of Directors for approval or rejection, the interview tapes need to be included as part of the recommendation in order to give the Board full insight into why the Nom Com chose to recommend or deny certain candidates.  The board should then accept or reject the slate, and if they choose to reject the slate, decide how they’re going to move forward; the discussions surrounding the slate should not be released, but the vote should.  That way, if the general membership felt that the process was unfair, they could contact the Board members and move forward with resolving the issue.

Tweak 3: Maximize member involvement

I think one of the hardest problems to tackle in this discussion is the issue of member involvement; as I mentioned earlier, the theme of “community vs. PASS” is a difficult pill for me to swallow because I see every member of PASS (including the Board) as member of the community.  I also realize (as a chapter leader) that there are many members of the community which are not PASS members, and members of both subsets that are not active in many of the social networks that were abuzz with concerns over the process.

Let me back up and clarify: I’m a chapter leader for AtlantaMDF, and at one point, we had nearly 1500 SQL Server Professionals on our private mailing list.  These were people who at one point had registered for a meeting of ours; I’d consider them member of the community.  Are they PASS members? Maybe.  Are they active on twitter, or active bloggers?  Dunno; my experience presenting on these topics leads me to believe that the vast majority of SQL Server Professionals are NOT involved in social networking.  Kendra Little had a similar take on the problem of uninvolved membership (I stole the graph from her):

Voting stats from the last few elections would probably back up this idea; although I don’t remember the actual numbers, I do remember thinking that the voter turnout was abysmal compared to the number of people that PASS claims as members (remember that membership is free).  Sort of like the same feeling I get when I think that AtlantaMDF invites 1500 people every month to come to a meeting, and 75 do; I’m grateful we got 75, but we’re missing a lot of interaction from 1425 other people.

So how do we involve the membership?  I think that Chapter Leaders (including Virtual Chapter Leaders) should be randomly selected and asked to serve on the Nom Com every election cycle, and the number of Chapter Leaders should always outweigh the number of Board seats by at least 1.   Why Chapter Leaders?  To me, they represent the local faces of PASS, and are the most likely ones to understand the pulse of the community.  Why not bloggers, tweeters, or columnists?  Although I think that social networkers provide a great service to the community, they don’t necessarily have an official relationship with PASS.   PASS serves the community, but I think the election process needs to be membership driven.

Involving the membership via Chapter Leaders on the Nom Com should (I hope) instill some trust in the process, even if the interview process yields an unpopular result.  It’s a lot harder to accuse the Nom Com of predetermining the outcome of an interview because of their ties to the Board if the Nom Com consists of a majority of non-Board members.

Summing up.

I have several other ideas (such as the possibility of a Chapter Congress), but many of them require drastic overhauls of how PASS does business; that’s simply not feasible.  I think many of the problems of the last two elections can be easily resolved with a few minor tweaks.  However, the first step is the conversation, and that conversation needs to begin well before the election season.  It’s easy to be upset about the outcome, but in order for real change to occur, we (the community) need to step up and participate in the conversations.  I am eagerly awaiting the chance; are you?