OK so sadly Buck can’t be with us this year, but if he could, he would tell you to join our Programme Committee!
This year, SQLSaturday Cambridge is pioneering the first ever Global Programme Committee for a SQLSaturday and we want you to be part of it!
After being personally involved in the PASS Programme Committee for many many years and playing a small part in reviewing abstracts, speakers and anything else that needs an opinion, it might be natural that I would want to take my experiences of this process and attempt to improve things -or at very least try a different approach.
Session and speaker selection for the PASS Summit is annually subject to much criticism (some fair and some less so), and I have long been a defender of this process -quite simply because I understand how it works. It is a long way from being perfect, but the reality is that it is no better and no worse than other popular Technology Conferences at session selection. But the reason it is open to so much criticism is because PASS is continually attempting to provide transparency (in the interests of fairness) to a process that can only ever really be opaque. As all event leaders will know, agendas do not pick themselves and even when they do, sometimes sessions must be rejected for a variety of reasons which might not always be obvious to the casual observer but could relate to sponsorship concerns, speaker history or even event demographics. Simply put I believe that session selection should only have one thing in mind – provide the audience with the agenda they want.
This year, with an ever overwhelmingly burgeoning bundle of Summit abstracts, I believe it is time for event leaders to stand up and be counted and start thinking about different ways that sessions can be reviewed and feed these experiences back to PASS HQ. With this in mind (and in order to deal with our record 151 abstract submissions), we have decided to survey the World! At the click of a button you will be able to take part in the World’s first ever SQLSaturday Global Programme Committee and this process is open to ALL – speakers, attendees, non-attendees and even school children! Yes, never before has a voting system been so open.
Our aim is to:
- Understand the technical and geographic demographics of the technical communities
- Encourage participation from the potential and actual audience
- Provide other events with technical insights (should we find any!)
- Promote new ideas to the other events
- Help PASS see how other session selection systems can work
- Simplify the process
- Select sessions based on actual demand not perceived demand
- GIVE YOU A VOICE!
Our selection process will:
- Complete the Global Programme Committee ratings
- Aggregate results
- Complete schedule by small internal team based upon these findings
- Global Abstract ratings (by you guys!) will continue and be open up until the day of our event in order to alter our schedule as needed and collate the most useful demographics to share with other events
Please could you lend us your support for 10 minutes of your time and become part of the World’s first SQLSaturday Global Programme Committee and help also to promote it to your friends? This mightjust be the beginning of something big…..
To join our programme committee, click HERE!
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