I’m in a bit of a sticky wicket here; as a blogger, I feel obligated to share what’s going on with the Nomination Committee for the 2010 PASS elections, but as a member of that committee, I feel obligated to not say too much too soon. However, I have seen some of the buzz on twitter regarding applicants that have been selected to continue moving forward and those that were encouraged to try again next year.
All I can really say at this time that we have looked at all of the applications that we’ve received and have decided to move forward with interviewing 7 of the 9 applicants. An official announcement is forthcoming about how we came to our decision to move forward with those 7, but I did want to share a piece of information that is guiding the process of selecting candidates for the board.
PASS is a volunteer organization that serves the SQL Server community, and although the goal of PASS is to be a resource for everyone who works with SQL Server, there are lots of members of the community that have a limited history of involvement with PASS. In other words, there are several community leaders (speakers, authors, bloggers) that don’t have hands-on volunteer experience with PASS (i.e., working as a chapter leader or a committee member); while these community leaders are great assets to the community (and PASS), I was concerned that they didn’t have enough exposure to the organization to lead it. This was a hard choice to make, because you could look at an application and see that the applicant had a real heart for leadership and support within the SQL Server community, but compared to other applicants, they just didn’t have the same experience with PASS.
Of course, that’s easy to rectify, and there’s always another opportunity to run for election next year. I’m excited about the applicants that are lined up to be interviewed over the next two weeks (and I’ll probably refrain from commenting until after those interviews are done). I’m also learning a lot about how PASS committees work, and I hope to continue helping out in the future.
Be sure to check out http://elections.sqlpass.org for the official news. Good luck to the rest of the applicants; regardless of what happens during the interviews, I am positive we will have a great slate of candidates to choose from during this year’s election.
