Notes on the 2020 PASS Virtual Summit – Part 5 from Blog Posts - SQLServerCentral

Thursday evening, writing a few more notes.

Felt like I struggled more to stay engaged and attentive today, which is above average for day 4 of a 5 day event, for me at least. About 3 pm I went for a long walk and listened to a presentation, that worked out well, it was stuff I mostly knew and didn’t need to see the slides. I used the phone app for that and it worked fine.

Some general feedback about presenting, I think that it’s easy to spend too much time up front on the ‘me’ slide, the ‘PASS’ slide, and whatever else. I’d be interested to see what everyone thinks, but for me that’s about a max of 2 minutes.

The question tab for the presentation tab is just ok. I saw at least one session where the answer was “answered”, presumably sometime during the presentation. That’s not very helpful to attendees (and moderators can mark questions as answered to help sort through the list). Better would be a quick sentence of two to summarize the answer, really superb might be that and/or a time mark in the presentation (go to 2 mins 15 to see more on the answer to this question, that kind of thing). I haven’t gone back to look, but for sessions that were pre-recorded in particular I wonder if the final recording will somehow contain the questions?

The phone app has an ‘activity feed’ section, though on my phone it looks more like ‘Activity fee’. Mildly funny. Doesn’t get seem to be much used.

Not being able to set a password really annoys me now. The phone app logged me out for whatever reason, so I had to go look up the password in the email they sent.

There’s a session evaluation button on each “room”, and that’s good, but I consistently forget to do it while I’m there and then have to go back and fill them out later (which means I do fewer). Some samples below, the eval screenshot is about 50% of the total questions you can answer.

Tim Ford talked a bit about financials at the start of the lunch keynote today and it was ok. Most of the key parts were there, but it would be easy to not read entirely between the lines. I appreciate trying to remain positive and highlight moves and decisions that have been made, but I’d have asked and hoped for something far more direct. I don’t see that video up as public anywhere yet.

I went to office hours for the Board around 4 pm, it’s the same video chat used in the network bubbles. Grant & Lori were there and there was some casual conversation and some good questions. I like it as a less formal and less stressful way for the Board to interact, but I do like and miss the whole Board being in front of an audience taking questions at the same time. For those who read my post from yesterday about the state of PASS financials, I’d say there is no good news. Summit registrations and PASS Pro signups are both well under the goals in the budget. They should have a final accounting within a couple weeks. I’ll leave it to the Board to share the exact numbers.

I didn’t do birds of a feather or really interact much with anyone today. Part introvert, part that it’s just not the same as seeing people and pausing for a few minutes of conversation. I hear that Jen and Sean have a discord channel set up, maybe tomorrow I’ll try to find that.

As far as content, there has been a good variety on the schedule and no major technical issues that I’ve seen. The networking piece is just harder to do well and to be fair I don’t have a vision for how to do it better. Maybe one suggestion is that attendees could set up their own times to chat and have it show up on the schedule sometime “Chat with Andy at 4pm” or whatever.

Tomorrow is the last day and the only new thing to try I have planned is moderating a session for Steve at 1030 I think.

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