SQL Saturday

This year I somehow forgot to say “No!” when I was asked to head up the selection process for SQL Saturday Atlanta.  Call me slow but I will not make that mistake ever again!  However, we did manage to accomplish several things this year. If memory serves (and don’t count on that), we hadn’t surveyed the user group for which sessions they wanted to see since SQL Saturday #41 back in 2010.  This year we were able to survey both the Atlanta MDF user group and the Atlanta B/I user group before making our final selections. We received 133 abstracts submissions this year but we didn’t want to make the people taking the survey to have to sift through all of those.  There were a good number of sessions that the team felt were no-brainers to be picked so we went ahead and removed most of those from the population before we sent out on the survey. I trust the content team (Kristy, Mike, Michael, the other Michael, & Stuart) who voted to select the initial list of speakers and trust them to have picked the entire schedule if we had gone down that route.  Surveying the user group however gave us the chance to calibrate our own judgment.  It also gave us someone not on the [all-volunteer] team to blame if attendees are unhappy with the sessions that were picked :-p (not that we’d do that). There were very few surprises in which sessions the community voted for.  The only thing that stood out was a few topics that just weren’t very highly ranked at all.

The upside

Not so much that we have a better idea what the community wants to see, we were actually pretty on-target, but now we have more confidence in our already well-formed opinions of what they community wants to see.

The downside

It took *a lot* of work to get the internal voting and then the survey pulled together.  This unfortunately led to a much longer than anticipated amount of time to get the full schedule selected and the speakers notified.  Absolutely no one on the team wanted it to take as long as it did.  In retrospect, it would have faster to immediately take the 133 sessions submitted and send all of them out on the survey; that would have reduced some but not all of the delay.   Unfortunately, we just had no way of knowing that at the time and I take full responsibility for not knowing what we didn’t know!  Thankfully, the team was able to overcome the challenges and pull everything together.  The silver lining is that we now have experience in surveying our groups and can do it much more quickly in the future.

Drumroll please…

Alright, enough about surveys and what-not.  Here is what YOU picked:

I look forward to see you at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta and can’t wait to hear your feedback on the sessions you attend! 

Survey

Today we have sent out a survey to the folks who have registered for SQL Saturday Atlanta to get their help with selecting a few of the sessions for the event.  Some of the sessions are from speakers whom the team knows we want to speak and we just need help selecting which session of theirs to pick.  We know which session we want to see, but we’re not the only ones who will be there   Because of the strong demand to speak at SQL Saturday Atlanta it is unlikely that any speakers will get two sessions so please make your voice heard!

The other sessions are ones where the team couldn’t come to a consensus on who to select.  We’ve decided to seek your input here as well.

Advanced Sessions

Beyond the survey, I wanted to let folks know that in looking over the abstracts submitted, the team has determined (and voted) that there were not enough Advanced sessions to include on the schedule.  Because of this, we have decided to open the call for speakers again but this time we will only but for “Advanced” sessions only.  Any newly submitted Intermediate or Beginner sessions will not be considered because we’re going to use the feedback from the above mentioned survey to help us finish picking from what has been submitted already.

We’re only holding back 5 session slots for this attempt, a mere 10% of our schedule, so please act quickly.

We value everyone’s time!

Again, we value everyone’s time! Obviously we will give preference to any speakers who already submitted and wants to submit an “Advanced” session for us to consider.  However, if you did not submit already and have an Advanced session you would like to submit, please do!  We will close the call for speakers again as soon as we think we have enough Advanced sessions we can move forward with.  We’re not going to keep it open any longer than we need to.

We’re also not going to hold up notifying the first 45 speakers because of the extended Advanced sessions call, the hold up there has been getting a survey together and out.  Serious lessons learned there!  (but that’s a completely different blog post.)

At the end of the day, we’re just trying to come up with the best content for the people who are missing out on their Saturday to learn more.  I hope this helps explain things and gets people excited about the next SQL Saturday Atlanta!

[Already] Submitted Speakers

You may have received an email today from the SQLSaturday website announcing an extended call for speakers; our goal was to stress the limitations of this call (Advanced topics only), but the system-generated email went out without our intended edits.  We’re VERY sorry for the confusion.

Did I mention that we value everyone’s time?