Summit

Ah, summertime; time for the annual “community crisis” for the Professional Association for SQL Server. I’ve tried to stay clear of controversies for the last couple of years, but it’s very hard to be a member of such a passionate group of professionals and not have an opinion of the latest subject d’jour. The short form of the crisis is that there’s questions about how and why sessions get selected to present at the highly competitive Summit this year (disclaimer: I got selected to present this year). For more details, here’s a few blog posts on the subject:

The point of my post is not to rehash the issue or sway your opinion, dear reader, but rather to focus on a single tiny step in the right direction that I’ve decided to make. One of the big issues that struck me about the whole controversy is the lack of a repeatable objective tool for speaker evaluations. As a presenter, I don’t always get feedback, and when I do, the feedback form varies from event to event, meeting to meeting. Selection committees are forced to rely on my abstract-writing skills and/or my reputation as a presenter; you can obfuscate my identity on the abstract, but it’s tough to factor in reputation if do that.

While I agree that there are questions about the process that should be asked and ultimately answered, there’s very little that I can do to make a difference in the way sessions get selected. However, as a presenter, and a chapter leader for one of the largest chapters in the US, I can do a little something.

I am personally committing to listing every presentation I make on SpeakerRate.com, and soliciting feedback on every presentation. To quote Bleachers, “I wanna get better”.
I will personally encourage every presenter at AtlantaMDF to set up a profile and evaluation at SpeakerRate for all presentations going forward.
We will find ways to make feedback electronic and immediate at the upcoming Atlanta SQLSaturday so that presenters can use that information going forward.
I will champion the evaluation process with my chapter members and speakers, and continue to seek out methods to improve and standardize the feedback process.

Do I have all of the right answers? No. For example, SpeakerRate.com seems to be barely holding on to life; no mobile interface, and a lack of commitment from its members seems to indicate that the site is dying a slow death. However, I haven’t found an alternative to provide a standard, uniform measure of presentation performance.

Do I think this will provide a major change to the PASS Summit selection? Nope. But I do think that a sea change has to start somewhere, and if enough local chapters get interested in a building a culture of feedback and evaluation, that could begin to flow up to the national level.

And I didn’t do too bad; wish I had done better. I said that when I was done, I felt like it was a “B” level presentation, and it was; I got a 4 out of 5 on my evals. If I had been a less experienced speaker, I would be thrilled with that; as it stands, I’m a little bummed. I know that it’s tough to get accepted to speak at Summit, and I feel bad that I didn’t hit this one out of the park.

However, it was a great experience; 73 people attended my session, which is a big audience for me. I struggled with my demos throughout (I don’t even want to listen to the audio because I’m worried about how bad it was), and I should have worked on finding ways to better connect with my audience. The feedback I got was really constructive:

Was a good intro, just would have liked to have seen some broader examples. For example converting XML into relational tables, not in detail but just at a high level.

Lots of demos geared towards people who have already written a lot of XQuery. This should have been a 201 session. A discussion on why you’d even use the XML datatype would have been useful. What problem does the XML datatype even solve for people?

I think I would have benefitted from a hard copy (gasp) of the XML data. I would have been able to see the data and compared it to your on screen results

Way too fast, too ambitious for a 101 session

Well put together and paced. Very clear and coherent

Scale back expectations if it really is a 101 level session

So it sounds like I didn’t do the best job of making my abstract clear; people had different expectations than what I had for what a 100 level course was supposed to be. I do agree that it was too much content, and if I present on the topic again, I’ll be sure to go back to splitting this up to focus on the basics of XPath, and save a discussion of FLWOR for later. Also, I really should have used demos much more judiciously; I kept running code and trying to work the magnifier, when I should have just used slides for the basics, and then done a much more thorough demo.

So what did I learn? Connect with the audience first and foremost. If I could have kept them engaged and entertained, I may have covered less material, but may have inspired them to do more research on their own (which in the end, is the point of this whole exercise).

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