I’d asked my friend and a form ED of PASS to add her thoughts about the governance process for not-for-profit organizations. Carol is one of the industry’s top professionals, serving as the chief operating officer for many years at some of the largest IT and non-IT professional associations. I always look forward to her insight. She writes…
As an Executive Director for another user group community, I can offer up a few thoughts as it relates to Nominating Committee best practices. I’ve been working with technology and various vendors for over 20 years, and I’ve seen the community “popular” vote vs. a vetted, nominating committee driven process. Both can work and in the “day” most organizations had open elections. In my opinion as technology and business evolved, so did the business of user groups. These aren’t clubs, they are multi-millionaire dollar businesses with the difference being no profits are returned to individual directors but reinvested in the community. A slated election based on the recommendations of peers from the community is in my opinion (and pretty much everyone who leads governance or knows about governance for any kind of association) the best practice.
Here are some thoughts from an excerpt of an article written by a governance expert, Mark Thorsby regarding nomcom process:
Today, successful associations are devoting increasing attention to ensuring that their governing boards comprise a diverse – yet unified in mission – group of talented volunteers. For the sake of their associations, it is vital that these committees be constituted and operated in ways that epitomize their chances for success.
Make-up of the NomCom: The committee should be composed primarily, if not exclusively, of current or recently retired board members because they are the only ones who really know what the board needs in terms of talent, governance culture and personal style. Some committees involve non-board members, but they often need to be taught what is required for board service, which can consume precious time. There’s a trade-off, of course, among “fresh air,” transparency and efficiency. The chief staff officer plays an integral role in advising the committee on such issues, as he or she often is the most knowledgeable about candidates.
The nominating committee establishes its criteria for the officers and/or directors it is seeking to nominate based on the “charge” – a defined, desired outcome – it receives from the board of directors. This charge usually defines the desired characteristics, perspectives, styles, values and experience of nominees, sometimes with an eye toward achieving a better balance according to certain factors involving age, geography, style, etc. It is not unusual for each candidate to be asked to complete a simple candidacy form that collects information for the nominating committee to use in vetting.
The object of the vetting process is to select nominees for an officer or director position who best suit the leadership needs of the association. The nominees are not always the best speakers from the community, or the most highly technical, but are the best team members given the leadership needs of the group. This can be a very difficult process because the nominating committee has multiple factors to consider. The best advice is to take time and get it right.
It is important that each nominee understands what is expected of him or her and why the nominating committee believes they are the right fit.
Past experience is not a predictor of future performance – particularly if that experience has been service on committees. Governance is very different from management.
Name recognition, professional status and reputation do not always make for a good governing board member.
Diversity and balance are key attributes of a successful governing board. Achieving both is the responsibility of the nominating committee.
It is a myth that a position on the governing board is something that is earned. It is the association that is honored by the member who is willing to serve.
In a nutshell, the role of the nomcom is not an easy one. I have seen it be met under fire before. In the end, I think trusting your fellow members who gave of their time and effort, and followed a well constructed procedure of selecting a critical set of thought leaders for your association is the most important. Remember – these individuals are also offering their personal time – no bonus check heading their way…..I would echo comments made that the community respect their opinions and the process that PASS has put forward is a solid one that not only is fair, but ensures that PASS board selection is not just about “popularity.”
As a way of recognizing and thanking it’s contributors, SQLServerPedia is holding annual awards for the best blog posts syndicated on the site from November 2009 – October 2010.
Editors Iain Kick (blog | twitter), Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter), and myself have scoured SQLServerPedia.com to find the most informative and useful posts across a wide range of categories that were posted over the last year.
Voting opens today (November 1st) and closes November 8th. Winners will be announced by e-mail, on the site and at the Quest hosted cocktail party at The Tap House Grill, Tuesday, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m. PT. If you are attending PASS, please come along and enjoy a drink. It will be a great opportunity for me to meet you in person. Winners will receive a badge to place on their blog site and a statue award for your desk/car/top of your house!
Cheers!
-Kev
I won it myself!
P.S. Current or former Quest and ISV employees are exempt from the contest.
If you haven’t paid attention to the new social media, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Just as email was a game-changer in the 1980s and the internet revolutionized society in the 1990s, social media is making a huge impact on the way people work and interact today. Personally, I was skeptical about social networking until some good friends persuaded me to give it a trial run. It seemed like a great way to dither away some valuable time, but I didn’t see the business value in the whole proposition until I tried it. [READ MORE]
Want a seat in the board room? Better bring your A game.
The skills that enable a person to be a top-tier database professional have very little to do with being a successful member of a board of directors. So what skills are needed for a person to be successful on a board of directors for any large organization? Here are a handful of skills, in no particular order, that I’ve seen demonstrated by very successful directors from days past:
Strategic thinking
Let’s face it – technology is detail-oriented work. No database professional can be truly effective at their job if they never get the parameters correct when calling a function, can’t remember the correct syntax for simple SQL query, or know their server only as a “DL something-er-other”. You have to know the details to be able to get your work done quickly. However, getting into the details at a board-level discussion is the exact opposite of how a director most effectively spends their time. Instead, board members need to figure out all of the elements of the big picture first. This time of assessmentis predicated upon have a strong understanding of the organization’s top few strategic goals, usually no more than 3-5 goals in any given year. Every new program needs to be evaluated against those strategic goals and, many times, what might seem like a great idea turns out to conflict with the organizational goals. After a new program or idea is vetted against PASS’ strategic goals and passes the test, it needs to be fully conceptualized – sort of like a programmer’s model of a program in pseudocode or a database in an ER diagram. Once that’s done, the various elements of the big picture are handed off to either specific board members or other high-level PASS volunteers for implementation.
I’ll give you an example. One of our past directors for PASS, whenever a new program was being discussed, would immediately begin to throw out detailed solutions to the program in question. “Oh! We could code that in ASP.NET and, now that I think of it, it’d be really cool to try the new .NET framework.” People would then start to argue about what’s the right technology to use. “No, we should use C#!” Sometimes, the discussion would devolve into an argument between different technological zealots who wanted things done “the best way” – that is, the way they like it. But wait a minute! The board hadn’t even come to consensus on what features the program would include, when it would be launched, who would be accountable for its success, how it would be funded, and who would do the grunt work to complete it.
So, to me, the first characteristic of a successful director is strategic, “big picture”, thinking.
Values drive the Mission. Mission drives the Strategy. Strategy seeks to accomplish Goals.
Vision
I’ve had the pleasure to work with many directors, both elected and appointed, over the years on the PASS board. There are a lot of reasons that motivate people to put their name into the hat for a seat on the board. Some are motivated by ambition. They want to see that cool entry of “director” on their resume and the new job opportunities it might open. Some are motivated by zeal for the community. PASS enabled them to learn a lot and they want to pay it forward to future generations of SQL Server professionals. Some are high-achievers who are a little bored by their day-to-day job and would like to liven it up with new challenges that are still pertinent to their career. Yet, no matter what motivates a candidate to seek a seat on the board, I’ve noticed that those who have a vision for change they’d like to accomplish in their time on the board are those who are most likely to make a difference.
Now when I saw “a vision for change”, I don’t mean an amorphous, pie-in-the-sky ideal. I mean, literally, that these successful candidates want to do one (or more) clearly defined projects for the benefit of the SQL Server community. They have in their mind a before- and after-picture of PASS. “This is what PASS looked like before I came to the board and, thanks to me, PASS looks different in this after-picture!” By comparison, directors who have no particular vision or who have a vision that is at cross-purposes with the organization, at best, muddle along in mediocrity or, at worst, flame out and walk away from the board with hard feelings.
Here are a couple examples. First, I’ve seen many fine technologists take a seat at the director’s table over the years whose attitude could best be described as “What the heck am I doing here?!? I sure hope someone tells me what to do.” If you’re not inspired, not burning with powerful desire for change, don’t particularly want to see a particular something happen within PASS then I really need to point out that this job might not be for you. A few such board members later caught fire, but most of the board members who came in without a vision for change, unsurprisingly, accomplish little. As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you get there. Second, we’ve had a couple board members who came to the board with a strong mission in mind targeted on altruism of some sort, like training underprivileged kids or organizing PASS members for volunteerism outside of PASS. These kinds of goals, while very worthy, need to be met outside of PASS through organizations that specialize in that kind of work. Let’s be honest, PASS has tiny budgets. And its directors have a very finite amount of time and energy for their volunteer activities. Any moneys or personal energies spent on things that don’t accomplish PASS’ strategic goals in fact decrease it’s ability to do so.
Where are we now? Where should we be tomorrow?
Emotional Intelligence
Many of us went into technology because we don’t LIKE to spend all day trying to read people’s subtle clues about what they want or how they are feeling. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition works just as well for you if you use harsh tones with it as if you soothingly reassure it that you’re on its side. And you can’t debug a CLR routine any faster if you use affirming body language. Unfortunately, for the technophiles out there who’d rather send an email to the person in the cube next them instead of walking three steps to have an interpersonal discussion, board work is almost 100% person-to-person. The most effective directors have been those who can tell when someone is tuning them out, chose their words in a way that holds and retains interests of their audience, and can perceive the difference between when a person is truly supporting them and when a person is merely being polite.
Believe it or not, though, I’m not saying that effective directors are always the most suave or polished. That’s not the case at all. We’ve had some very gruff, even abrasive, directors over the years. But many of them were successful all the same because they understood how to communicate their most important messages effectively and, at the same time, read the subtle and nonverbal responses of their peers on the board for support.
Here’s a worst-practice example. Immediately after getting a seat on the board many years ago, a former director spoke up in topic after topic at board meetings and calls throughout the year. By the second board meeting of the year, other board members would roll their eyes when he’d jump in. It didn’t matter to him that he was off topic – he had the floor, by gosh. It seemed that, more and more, this director was primarily speaking up in search of “pats on the back” and “you’re so smart!” sorts of positive strokes, not to actually advance the conversation. Everyone came to feel like he was wasting their time. When this director presented a proposal for a major new initiative to the board which he was sponsoring (which took several hours, by the way, about three times the length of a normal proposal), he basked in the spotlight at the podium like a rock star. Unfortunately, he failed to present a cohesive proposal and, on top of that, hadn’t vetted his ideas before hand with a single other member of the board. I sometimes wondered if he worked alone because he didn’t want anyone to share in the glory of his great ideas. His proposal, and his wider tenure on the board, fell flat because every exchange with him felt like his time on the board was all about him, instead of all about the organization.
Summary
There are lots of minor skills that help a candidate become an exceptional director. Knowing how to create and read a budget helps a lot. Having project estimating and project management skills certainly yields good fruit. Running a good meeting and helping to drive for consensus are great skills to bring to the board room. Being diplomatic and learning how to build political capital can help a director implement ideas that they favor. But, all things considered, successful directors do these three things:
Think strategically rather than in terms of low-level details
Have a vision for one or more changes that they want to enact during their time on the board.
Know how to communicate interpersonally and gain the support of their colleagues on the board.
The good news about these three key skills is that, while not natural to most SQL Server professionals, they can be learned. Where to start? In my next column, I’ll point out some on-line resources which can help you learn these key skills of strategic leadership.
In my many years on the board of directors of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), I frequently exhorted our members to strive for individual achievement and personal excellence. One of the best paths for many SQL Server professionals is through certification, especially if they lack years of demonstrated on-the-job experience. However, certification only paints half the picture. While it might demonstrate, at a minimum, that you passed a test (or several tests) about the database technology, it tells nothing about your standards for good conduct. [READ MORE]
An expert roundtable discussion hosted by SQL Server Expert Kevin Kline and featuring speakers from Microsoft, EMC, Avanade, HP and Quest Software.
With the release of SQL Server 2005 and its focus on Business Intelligence, SQL Server professionals are faced with unprecedented amounts of data to manage. How are you dealing with the flood of data?
At the PASS Community Summit 2006, experts from Quest Software joined forces with a variety of other SQL Server industry experts for a panel discussion around the implications of managing large volumes of business critical data on SQL Server and recommendations for ensuring availability and performance in your environment.
Some areas explored:
- Storage strategies
- Issues around moving to Storage Area Networks (SAN)
- Performance on SAN
- BI growth and multi-terabyte data stores
- Server scale out and consolidation
- Real world implementation and management challenges
Though things have died down a bit since the initial backlash, the recent development in the PASS board election process is still the talk of the town. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of folks about this, and have read some excellent blogs and other opinion pieces from those on both sides of the debate. I traded some e-mails with Kevin Kline, a longtime member of the PASS board of directors, and he asked an interesting question:
“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken. Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning? Please explain your thoughts?”
I’ve been careful not to write too often about this out of fear of belaboring the point, but I think Kevin’s question (and some of the other responses already offered up) illuminate a path to help the community heal its recent wounds and find a better way to do things in the future. To that end, I’m glad to share my opinion.
It’s STILL The Process
I can’t emphasize this enough – I believe this to have been a process failure, not a people failure. I blogged about this just after the story broke, and I pointed out that I believe this to be a deficiency in the institution rather than a bunch of folks making bad decisions, or worse, conspiring to keep a particular person out of the leadership of PASS. It was, and still is, my belief that some personal biases contributed to the end result, but I don’t expect that there was a conspiracy to exclude anyone. I greatly appreciate the work of the NomCom, especially the members who were selected from the community (those who are not board members). They put in a lot of hard work, stuck to their guns on the decision they made, and took it on the chin for the sake of the integrity of the process. While I still feel that their decision was not in the best interest of PASS, I thank them for their service and applaud their willingness to politely engage their critics.
Where Do We Go From Here?
With the blame placed firmly on the process, let’s get back to Kevin’s question. Where do we go from here? Do we rip out the plumbing and start over, or can we just repair the leaky pipes? Before we answer that question, let’s look at…
The Good
Yes, there are things that I like about the current process <gasp>. For example, let’s pretend for a moment that the election process has no vetting whatsoever, and anyone who throws their name in the proverbial hat will appear on the final ballot. Yes, you’ll find folks like Steve Jones, Jack Corbett, Geoff Hiten, Allen Kinsel, and others who are highly qualified, but you’ll also end up with folks who simply run because there’s nothing to lose. The existence of a proper vetting process will encourage applicants to self-screen to some extent, but the absence of such a formality could greatly increase the number of unqualified applicants. There are a couple of risks with having no qualification process: First, the truly qualified candidates will be lost in a sea of other names, and the voting process becomes as low-tech as “which one of these people have I heard of before?”. Second, the odds of an unqualified person actually making it onto the board are quite high, which is a risk for the future of the PASS organization. I am in favor of having candidates pass through a screening process, and I think the theory (not necessarily the current implementation) is sound.
Another positive is the amount of progress made towards transparency. What used to be a black box now permits a good deal of visibility by the community, and even though some parts of the process are cloaked from public view, I think PASS as a whole is committed to improving the transparency of their processes. There is still lots of room for improvement, but it’s safe to say that improvements have been made.
The Bad
We could go on and on here, but most of the dialog would be centered around once core question: Who is qualified to run for a BoD position? Hopefully we can all agree that last year’s selection process was a mess, when candidates including Tim Ford were excluded while another with no knowledge of the PASS mission or community was deemed to have been qualified. This year’s process resulted in the exclusion of a candidate who is the epitome of the SQL Server community. So maybe he had a bad interview (we are allowed to know that “something happened” during the interview, but nothing more) – it happens. Moving forward, the NomCom needs to have the flexibility – no, the responsibility – to look beyond just one interview to better judge the candidate’s abilities and contributions.
The NomCom doesn’t need to go away – it just needs new rules of engagement. The mission needs to be refined and simplified: Eliminate the unqualified candidates. Let’s set some reasonable minimum qualifications of education, leadership, volunteerism, and organization, and judge the candidates equally and fairly across those axes. Beyond that, let the community decide whom of those qualified should be on the board.
Bent or Broken?
Bent. I think there’s enough sound logic to salvage this process, but we must remember the lessons learned these last two years. The process isn’t fatally flawed, but it does need to be resuscitated.
Obviously, the angst over the 2010 PASS elections still lives on for some, and some of you are probably ready to move on to more immediate concerns, but as for me, I’m stuck here trying to figure out what I should learn from all of this. I do think we as a community need to move forward, and to that end, I’ve agreed to participate in Kevin Kline’s series on the PASS elections process, and answer the following question:
“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken. Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning? Please explain your thoughts?”
Learning from the experience…
I don’t want to keep rehashing the past, because it’s been done (here, here, here, and here, to name a few; if you want a LOT more reading material, the elections site has a bunch of blog entries). While there are lots of lessons to be learned, and ideas to be discussed, I think there are two key points that are not stressed enough:
Our discourse as a community has been healthy, and
Nobody involved in the process has walked away clean.
For the first point, I think we’ve been able to keep our disagreements civil; there have been some comments made from several key contributors to the discussion that have been more cutting than others, and I have said some things that I should have kept to myself, but all in all, I don’t think we’ve burned any bridges that can’t be rebuilt. The only lingering meme that continues to bother me is the occasional “community-vs.-PASS” theme that is implied in some of the discussions; I’ll talk more about why that bothers me in a bit, but I fear we too easily fall into the trap of needing to define an invisible “Them” to be an antithesis to our “We”. We is Them, and They are We.
The second point was driven home to me like a dagger to the heart in a response from Andy Warren to a dialogue in the comments section of Brent Ozar’s post on the issue:
Agreeing to disagree is seldom satisfying, but often necessary. I’m entirely biased about my views on this, but I think it’s easy to forget the pain that continues along with this discussion. Replace the name of SJ with yours, and imagine how it would feel to be left off the slate (fairly, unfairly or otherwise), and then have a conversation continue that seems to imply a great failure during the interview, but no details emerge. Do you defend yourself or lay low? What if you allow the inner details to be published, but they are not?
We don’t agree on the way things worked out. Ok. I think we should let things heal a little more, then have the values and process conversation that we should have had last year – one that I’ve admitted I should have helped to make happen. Yell at me. Yell at the process. But I think we’re at the point where we leave a good man to tend his wounds and we try to do better next year, or we have the entire conversation and let the chips fall where they way on each side. I vote for moving forward.
Not my place to tell you not to talk about it, and much of this has been good conversation. But please remember my friend is not an abstraction. Actually, I wish I could say that better. I know that you don’t he is an abstraction, but I’m not sure that this conversation, right now, helps any of us.
I’ve been so busy defending what I perceived to be attacks on the character of the Nom Com or the quality of my work that I’ve forgotten what it must be like to be in Steve’s place, and for that I’m truly sorry. I don’t regret my choice to point out what I think are inaccurate statements about the process, but I should have tempered my comments with more grace than I did. That being said, I think we all need to step back and realize that nobody was completely happy with this year’s election process; obviously, the controversy was not a desired outcome by anyone on the Nom Com, the Board, or the membership at large. So how do we fix the process moving forward?
Is the process irreparably broken?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: I think if you look at any business that has an electable Board of Directors, the nominations process is similar; the Board appoints a committee to find qualified candidates, and then votes to approve or reject the slate. The elections process should be simple, but fair; I don’t think that a Board of an organization need be run like the federal government (with election cycles dictating workflow). That being said, I think there are lots of opportunities to tweak the process, and learn from our mistakes.
Tweak 1: Standardize the qualifications for a Director
I think PASS made strides this year, but there should be very specific minimum requirements for a seat at the table. Andy Leonard and K. Brian Kelley both made excellent points about the inadequacy of using a ranking system to evaluate certain concrete measures like Education and References. If we must use a ranking system, then the criteria for the ranks need to be carefully defined, like so:
Applicant must have a Bachelor’s Degree (or equivalent University degree).
Add 1 point for a Master’s Degree in any subject.
Add 1 point for a Doctorate Degree in any subject.
Please note that the above example is merely intended to illustrate specific ranking criteria; the definition of Education itself warrants more discussion than I have time for in this post.
Experience with PASS is another great example of a objective measure that needs standard ranking; how long have you been a member? What volunteer roles have you performed? Is experience as a chapter leader more or less valuable than experience on the Program Committee? Whatever standards are chosen, they should be well-defined and applied evenly from year to year; if an applicant doesn’t change their behavior from year to year (i.e., an applicant with little PASS experience in year 1 doesn’t get involved in year 2), they should have the same score.
Applications should be made available to the public, as well as the ranking using the standardized questionnaire described above; the general members of PASS should feel confident that the scoring system used to evaluate an application reflects the applicant’s ability to meet the minimum requirements.
However, I think that discussions within the Nominations Committee, including interviews with the applicants, should remain opaque: a black box. I know others think that the Nom Com should be completely transparent, but I think that the job of the Nom Com is to probe areas beyond the minimum qualification, and in order to do so, the members of that group need the ability to ask questions that may not be appropriate for general consumption. I think this protects both the applicants and the volunteer interviewers (what if I, as a volunteer, were to ask a really stupid question? Should I be vilified on the Internet by the membership?). But here’s the rub: the interviews need to be recorded.
The interviews should NEVER be released to the general membership, but once the slate has been presented to the Board of Directors for approval or rejection, the interview tapes need to be included as part of the recommendation in order to give the Board full insight into why the Nom Com chose to recommend or deny certain candidates. The board should then accept or reject the slate, and if they choose to reject the slate, decide how they’re going to move forward; the discussions surrounding the slate should not be released, but the vote should. That way, if the general membership felt that the process was unfair, they could contact the Board members and move forward with resolving the issue.
Tweak 3: Maximize member involvement
I think one of the hardest problems to tackle in this discussion is the issue of member involvement; as I mentioned earlier, the theme of “community vs. PASS” is a difficult pill for me to swallow because I see every member of PASS (including the Board) as member of the community. I also realize (as a chapter leader) that there are many members of the community which are not PASS members, and members of both subsets that are not active in many of the social networks that were abuzz with concerns over the process.
Let me back up and clarify: I’m a chapter leader for AtlantaMDF, and at one point, we had nearly 1500 SQL Server Professionals on our private mailing list. These were people who at one point had registered for a meeting of ours; I’d consider them member of the community. Are they PASS members? Maybe. Are they active on twitter, or active bloggers? Dunno; my experience presenting on these topics leads me to believe that the vast majority of SQL Server Professionals are NOT involved in social networking. Kendra Little had a similar take on the problem of uninvolved membership (I stole the graph from her):
Voting stats from the last few elections would probably back up this idea; although I don’t remember the actual numbers, I do remember thinking that the voter turnout was abysmal compared to the number of people that PASS claims as members (remember that membership is free). Sort of like the same feeling I get when I think that AtlantaMDF invites 1500 people every month to come to a meeting, and 75 do; I’m grateful we got 75, but we’re missing a lot of interaction from 1425 other people.
So how do we involve the membership? I think that Chapter Leaders (including Virtual Chapter Leaders) should be randomly selected and asked to serve on the Nom Com every election cycle, and the number of Chapter Leaders should always outweigh the number of Board seats by at least 1. Why Chapter Leaders? To me, they represent the local faces of PASS, and are the most likely ones to understand the pulse of the community. Why not bloggers, tweeters, or columnists? Although I think that social networkers provide a great service to the community, they don’t necessarily have an official relationship with PASS. PASS serves the community, but I think the election process needs to be membership driven.
Involving the membership via Chapter Leaders on the Nom Com should (I hope) instill some trust in the process, even if the interview process yields an unpopular result. It’s a lot harder to accuse the Nom Com of predetermining the outcome of an interview because of their ties to the Board if the Nom Com consists of a majority of non-Board members.
Summing up.
I have several other ideas (such as the possibility of a Chapter Congress), but many of them require drastic overhauls of how PASS does business; that’s simply not feasible. I think many of the problems of the last two elections can be easily resolved with a few minor tweaks. However, the first step is the conversation, and that conversation needs to begin well before the election season. It’s easy to be upset about the outcome, but in order for real change to occur, we (the community) need to step up and participate in the conversations. I am eagerly awaiting the chance; are you?
Much has been voiced about the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Nominating Committee’s decision to not put Steve Jones (blog, twitter) on the ballot for this year’s Board of Directors election. I’ve watched this controversy unfold with great interest, biting my tongue to keep from making rash or reactionary comments one way or the other.
I’m currently working on a guest blog post for a series that Kevin Kline (blog, twitter) is starting on the election process. In the coming days my guest post will appear on my site and on Kevin’s blog. I’m hopeful that Kevin’s series will help to provide some good, creative, and perhaps even actionable discussion around the PASS election process.
In the meantime, there has been one aspect of the brouhaha that I’d like to call attention to that may not be immediately obvious – the passion we all have for the community.
Aw, Come On Man!
It’s been said that the opposite of love is not hate; it’s apathy. Love and hate are strong emotions. If you love someone or something, you do it with a passion. Likewise if you hate something, you have a certain fervor about it. Whether there is love or hate, strong emotions abound and you care deeply about it.
Where there’s apathy, though, there is a lack of caring, a lack of passion or fervor. There’s an emptiness and the once loved/hated object ceases to have relevance in your life. It’s a sad state, apathy.
If nothing else, the latest PASS controversy has proven that people in the community have deep-seated emotions about PASS. It’s shown that PASS is a relevant and important player in the SQL community.
So in that respect, I’m glad that this election debate has stirred emotions and passion in most people in the community. If it hadn’t, I’d have been really worried about PASS and the community as a whole.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Now let’s see if we can turn this into a positive experience that, while difficult to go through, makes PASS and the community a stronger and more vibrant place.
Look for a post with my opinion on the election process soon. After that, I’ll get back to the “So I Got Promoted, Now What?” series.
