On Saturday my son had his second baseball game.  When it was his turn to hit I reminded him to keep his eye on the ball because in his first game he had a struck out on a swing and a miss because he didn’t keep his eye on the ball.  I think that the PASS board has taken their eye off the ball resulting in a swing and a miss by not publishing the results of the January survey about where members would like to see the Summit held.  Last Friday (3/72010), Andy Warren (@sqlandy) shared that the board had gone over the results of the recent survey and voted on where to hold the next few Summits in his PASS Update #24 blog post. The interesting part of the blog post is this:

I’ve asked for the data to be posted on sqlpass.org, so far we haven’t managed that, hopefully soon. I also requested that we release the full detail records scrubbed of identifying data, but it was determined that doing so was too complicated!

I’m  not the first one to comment on this as Brent Ozar (@BrentO) quickly responded in his blog post, PASS Summit Location Voting Results.  I have to say that I agree with what he has to say,  I don’t care how complicated it is to publish the results, you have to do it.  Not publishing those results leaves open the possibility that, no matter what the board has decided to do for future Summits (apparently we can’t know where future Summits will be until the current Summit), it isn’t what the survey showed.  I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the board for whatever decision that they made regarding the location of upcoming Summit’s, the criticism is that they should release the results of the survey.  We, the members, are PASS and have the right to know those results. 

I’ve served on church board’s (not as big as PASS, but similar) before and I understand that sometimes a board needs to di what they believe is in the best interests of the organization, even if it is not popular with members.  I call that leadership, but please share the results and also the reasons why you made the decision you made.  The membership was asked what we thought, so we need to know the corporate results.  We also should know the decision that was made regarding future Summit locations.  We were asked for our input, so we need to know what it is and what was done with it.  This could be an issue that influences decisions to run for the PASS board and decisions on who to vote for and the election is BEFORE the Summit.

To go along with that last sentence, I am now considering applying for the PASS board.  I don’t know that I have all the right qualifications, but I think I’ll being doing it for the right reason, I’m passionate about PASS and the SQL Server Community and want to see it grow.  I’ve also been quick to speak out and offer criticism’s of decisions, and I believe that if you are going to be critical you need to be willing to take a leadership role.  There are a lot of great people in PASS (including ALL the board members), but we, those not already on the board, all have reasons for not running.  I’ve decided that I’ll always be able to find reasons NOT to do it, so now I’m looking for reasons TO do it. 

If you are passionate about PASS, I encourage YOU to do the same.