By the time you read this we’ll have completed the transfer of the SQLSaturday web sites and data to PASS HQ, leaving only the clean up tasks of transferring the domain and the email aliases for active events, something we plan to do by the second week of May. It definitely took longer than I had hoped, but it’s done, and now we can move into the next phase:

• How are we going to continue to add value to the tools? Lots of interest in a way to manage volunteers and a schedule builder for users. Can we put this in a dev environment and let volunteers add some of that? How do manage it, if at all?
• Lots of work to be done on the documentation, via the wiki at http://wiki.sqlsaturday.com. This is one of the projects I hope will work, as there is just too much good stuff to share via story telling.
• Figure out for certain how much HQ time each event will require – and possibly do work to reduce that number
• More effort on networking – I posted about that yesterday
• Grow the franchise. How do we get to 50+ events in the US in 2011? Not being the king of marketing, I think we should try to have at least one in every state in 2011, which means starting to look for prospects now and probably trying to get as many as possible in a room at the Summit to plan for next year.

A smaller project I took on was coming up with a concept for a ‘regional’ event, something that would fit in between a SQLSaturday and the Summit in terms of cost, size, and value. I wanted to put in a first class effort, so the proposal took four days over the course of a 10 day period. We’re looking at two different ways of attacking it, and as I write this we’re still in the review stage, will try to share a lot more detail soon.

Another interesting problem cropped up within the Board, we don’t really have a good process for managing votes. Votes require a motion, a second, but after that voting by email requires a longer timeline because not all are instantly accessible, and we want to give everyone time to vote. To make that more complicated, sometimes we need a vote now (rarely), and for things like the minutes we really only need a majority of votes before we release them to the members. It’s a case of having a one page process will really make things go smoother, and will be nice to hand to new board members.

May will be – hopefully – a slow time for me with regard to PASS, catching up on work and life related stuff, and then in June resuming work on the much delayed speaker bureau.