Shirts for Speakers?

One of the things we’ve done since the beginning is to give each speaker a nice polo with the event logo on. Speakers are volunteers, though sometimes we need to talk about them as just ‘speakers’ and forget they volunteer a good bit of time and energy doing their presentations. As we’ve grown though, there are more than a few of us that have a lot of shirts now and we’re starting to think on how to tweak the plan, both to save money and to give them something they’ll use.

Since I like to trial things in Orlando where I can watch, this year we’re only going to provide shirts for first time SQLSaturday speakers. We’re going to ask previous speakers to wear their existing SQLSaturday polo, which will definitely show some of the diversity and perhaps longevity of their participation. First time speakers will get a shirt with their name embroidered too! We still want to do something to recognize the speakers, and not sure yet what will work best. We’ve picked a couple small gifts for this year, but potentially over time even that gets crazy, speakers will have 10 different SQLSaturday coffee cups or whatever.

Of course it’s up to each event. Scott & Herve opted to go with more casual shirts for SQLSaturday #16 and that seemed like a good idea, fit the Florida environment and was something different.

The other part of the discussion is the budget. We’ve got almost 50 speakers in Orlando this year, so just shirts for all would be $1000. Some events in some regions will be able to raise that kind of money without issue, but in other cases it could really be a burden, or even undoable. So rather than a rigid policy, we’ll move to recommending shirts for at least first time speakers and suggest some small gift, maybe Starbucks cards, maybe something more creative. The important part is to say thank you when you give it, because regardless of the gift it’s not equal to the time investment they made.

Creating the About SQLSaturday Page

I just loaded up the about page and struggled to write it. It’s one of the times when I think I’d do better to tell it all to someone else and let them write it. I think that comes from a couple things:

• I get tunnel vision as much as anyone, so it’s hard to figure out what question(s) I need to answer
• Wanting to be really really transparent because it is all about karma for us, but how to say it without sounding defensive or just confusing the issue more?

Let me know what you think. Sometimes best to just do the best you can, call it v1.0, and then revise as you look, listen, and learn.

Fun with Firewalls

We have a couple of boxes at a local Denver co-location facility for the training business, SQL Share, SQLSaturday, and a few other things. Our firewall died a few weeks ago, and so I called a friend that I've typically used for network stuff. He found us one on eBay for $200 and last night was the time to install it. We'd been trying to coordinate things, and last night worked.

I'd given him the IPs and setup, and some preliminary work had been done yesterday, but there are things that you can't test until you get the real network set up. I should have known things were bad when we arrived and I couldn't get Jordan in at first. The security is tight and I hadn't said "2 people" so we needed to wait and get authorization from the company I rent space from. Once that was done, we got in and needed to get cage nuts into the rack for the firewall.

There's a shelf right above us and we had little space. I managed to use a screwdriver to get the top two nuts in. Then I went to get the last one in and couldn't. So I tried to squeeze it with finger and slipped, cutting below the thumbnail, and starting to bleed a little. While I sucked on it to get the bleeding stopped, Jordan told me I didn't need to mess with it that way and then proceeded to do the same thing.

A nice delay while both of us stopped the bleeding. Then we mounted things, got it plugged in, and started to configure it. Jordan did the work while I stood around, coughing in the extremely dry air of the colo. Fortunately we were in the hot aisle, and not the cold one, but it was still hard.

We had issues getting the firewall to first allow things out, and then to allow things back in. It's a little flaky to work with IOS, and you have to go slow. We kept having issues and things went slow. Our expected 30-60 minutes turned into 120 almost. That wasn't the way I wanted to spend a Saturday night, but it wasn't all bad. I saw a guy from the Denver User group there who was rebuilding a few boxes for his company and expected to be there for hours.

We finally narrowed it down to the ARP cache in the ISP switches. At the lowest level of networking, the switches are often set up with specific groups of ports working together. To speed the movement of packets, the switches cache the MAC address of your network card. That's the address burned into the card. It's similar to the IP address you have and the DNS caching your machine does. In this case it means when we unplugged the server and plugged that cord into the firewall right away, the switch thought it was a momentary interruption and didn't reset the ARP cache with the MAC addresses in it's memory tables.

Once we realized that our rules were correct, we went to the Network Operations Center for the colo and had them clear their switch's cache. That cleared things up and once that was done, things looked OK. Jordan drove to Barnes and Noble to check things from the outside while I hit the bank for funds.

We met up, thinks were working, and we called it a night.

Celebrating Event Leaders

SQLSaturday is about the attendees, finding ways to encourage volunteer participation, and definitely about building the pool of speakers. But it’s easy to forget…or at least not recognize sufficiently…the contribution of the event leaders who make it all happen. After attending and coaching a lot of these events, the ones that are most successful are the ones with a leader that is passionate and willing to sweat the details, but even the smallest events just would not happen without that one key person.

So…what to do to recognize that? Send them a plaque?

I think the first thing is to recognize their contributions in a more permanent way on the web site, building a page that lists the event leaders along with their bio and some links back to them, and then probably we should build it in to the event site as well.

There’s probably merit to the plaque idea as well, and we’ll have to look at a way to fund that – a minor challenge since we have no operating budget, but we’ll figure something out!

Advisory Council Page Published

We just added a page to the site to list the members of the Advisory Council, you can see it at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/advisorycouncil.aspx with links to their blogs and LinkedIn profiles. One of the things we hope to do is maintain the history as we go, so that people who put in time on the Council don’t seem to vanish when the next group comes in!

Mini Presentations

At the upcoming SQLSaturday #21 we originally set aside 2 hours for “mini” sessions, where each hour will have three 15 min presentations. Stuart gave this a try in Atlanta and it worked well, and I know a few user groups do something similar to try to get more people to participate. That’s exactly what we want too – give people a smaller time frame to fill if they are just start out, and sometimes there is just a niche topic that fits into 15 minutes. We’ve got 5 signed up and should be able to find someone for the 6th slot. Hold that thought for a minute.

Of course, when it comes to software it’s not always that easy. If you can picture the design, the schedule table is really three values; trackid, timeslotid, sessionid. We build the schedule using a control that allows drag and drop in a web page that in turn manages the schedule table. The control is a bit slow at times, but it works. Of course, when we did the quick and dirty build for SQLSaturday #1 way back in June 2007 we didn’t quite envision the mini concept. Interestingly even being in a hurry we can adjust the size of the time slots in 15 minute increments (to match the web control), but we didn’t plan on having different time slots per track. That means no way for us to show 15 minute sessions on one track without showing them on all the tracks. We created composite sessions to fit into the schedule that reference the three sub sessions – fixes the schedule, but causes other pain – our speaker mailing list is tied to the schedule table!

So, one of the small joys of writing about problems is that it makes you think and it worked in this case. Instead of combining the mini’s into hour blocks, we’ve assigned one new 15 minute time slot, effectively creating a position for one mini per track. Not only does this work well with the tools we have, it probably works out better for the presenter – greater chance that someone will come to see one mini than three.

Long term we may need to fix the time slot problem and along with it a related one, we don’t support multiple speakers per session. Both have been rare cases and usually the co-presenter just has their name in the session title or notes, but it happens enough it would be nice to have first class support for that case at least.

No regrets on the design. With limited time and resources you try to design for the reasonable case and I think we did that, and it will be interesting if and when we make these changes to see if it cascades into other changes or stays fairly isolated.