There has been a lot of things going on within the #SQLCommunity lately. Largely based on decisions the PASS Board of Directors have made recently. Some folks are out right against some things, others are like “MEH” what ever this too shall pass and some are agreeing to see change but don’t exactly like what/how it is happening.
Last night while talking with friends about some of these happenings Kerry walked into the dinning room and picked up a stray PASS sticker. You see I have a bag that I carry to events that has a small stash of swag, mostly stickers and a few pins. Some how one little guy was left out so he was left on the staging table (dining room table acts like a holding area when I am planning travel).
What happened next took us by surprise. I am not sure what caused him to go pick up that 1 lonely sticker. The one on the left was the singleton found in the dinning room and the one on the right I retrieved from my bag.
As you can see there are clearly 2 different messages below the logo. The new sticker is something I picked up in Indy at their SQLSat, Karla had sent quite a few so I grabbed some to replenish my stack. Funny we started thinking about the name change announcement and decided to look at the BoD meeting minutes. Sure enough August 14, 2014, item #4 PASS Branding. That is weird these stickers are from an event on August 9. Seems like we were moving towards this change for a while now. Also notice in the meeting notes the $30,000 approval for speaker travel and expenses for BaCon 2015 and a $40,00 approval to create computer based learning session room for BaCon.
Why didn’t we notice before? I am sure it has something to do with seeing the logo and the “Connect. Share. Learn” and just not parsing the parts in between.
I am feeling pretty torn about this whole fiasco. I mean sure there are some different types of data people out there, but why do we need/want to put them into our community? Why wouldn’t we build a different arm of PASS for the BA folks? Why would you water down what this community has stood for and what is most important to them. Sure lots of DBAs are still mad about us BI types but that has worked out well.
I have a dear friend that is frequent attender of Analytic conferences. When I asked her what conferences she goes to she replied with “Well most of the industry conferences have added an Analytics track.” I wasn’t surprised we’ve been friends a long time. She also mentioned that there have been several Big Data conferences that were funded with grant money. If you are interested in what types of conferences someone deep into analytics goes to, this was her list.
So her normal conferences:
International Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK)
International Conference on Education Data Mining (EDM2015)
IMS Global (focus on frameworks and standards)
Industry Specific:
Educause (annual meeting and ELI)
Sloan C
AERA
[…] about the election or the password controversy, but about the decision to become simply PASS in all marketing materials (gonna need a new hashtag for twitter). So much controversy, in fact, that Tom LaRock, current […]