At last week’s PASS Summit in Seattle, I had the privilege to interview Wayne Snyder, the PASS President. Wayne doesn’t blog or use Twitter, so I was excited to get the chance to talk with him, get to know him better, and learn about his roles and goals.

When I’m talking to somebody about a particular topic, I see warning flags whenever I hear things like “win-win” or “no drawbacks.” Most often, that means somebody’s trying to sell me something, or they haven’t thought enough about the challenges at hand. My conversation with Wayne, on the other hand, was a fresh, frank discussion of the pros and cons of several topics.

The Pros and Cons of Democracy

To Americans, the term “President” is synonymous with power because the Commander-in-Chief has the entire Armed Forces at his beck and call. The PASS President does have a volunteer army, but they’re not exactly at his beck and call. They’re volunteers with their own agenda and their own ideas. Wayne can’t simply come up with a vision, pick up the red phone, and force thousands of people to execute tasks.

Wayne observed that database administrators like control – and if we don’t have it, we fight to get it. I loved that observation, and I think it’s right on. That gave me a new appreciation for the difficulty of coordinating an association of volunteer DBAs! After reflecting about it for a couple of days, I think that’s a double-edged sword. While we might be used to fighting for control and winning it, we’re not quite as used to coming up with grand visions and executing on them. That’s more the domain of architects, BI consultants, and entrepreneurs, and that might serve to explain why those people have been more likely to run for Board of Directors positions and win.

In a democracy, anybody can voice their ideas, and PASS hasn’t had a problem coming up with new ideas. Even Twitter played into our democracy discussion. During the Thursday keynote by Dr. David DeWitt, PASS attendees were excitedly bantering on Twitter about the quality of the presentation. Folks just couldn’t get enough of DeWitt’s visual explanations of row storage versus columnar storage. One thing led to another, and people started asking whether the keynote would be included on the PASS DVDs. Rick Heiges, seated next to Wayne, watched the action unfold on Twitter. He turned to Wayne, asked if PASS could get the keynote onto the DVD, and Wayne went to the technical folks to find out. All this happened DURING the keynote! Immediately after the keynote, Wayne took the stage to announce that DeWitt’s presentation wasn’t originally scheduled to be on the DVD, but it would be added due to popular request. Great win for instant interactivity and democracy.

Not all ideas are so easy to act upon, though, because most ideas require money. For example, Wayne would love to do a speaker’s bureau to help DBAs deliver better presentations, but how do we fund it? This problem is compounded by PASS’s recent explosive growth. PASS has grown more in the past 2 years than the previous 8, with many more chapters, yet our funding hasn’t kept pace. Wayne worried that we may have grown ourselves into poverty – grown beyond our ability to effectively fund everything we’re trying to do. Wayne said the single most important thing on his agenda was diversifying PASS’s revenue streams.

PASS Chapters and National Revenue Streams

One way to fix it is to coordinate with vendors to get national sponsorships. Right now, individual chapters approach vendors directly and get small sponsorships, but this isn’t always effective. Small chapters and new chapters don’t have the network of contacts or the time to work with every vendor to get the money they need. I’ve seen this problem firsthand at Quest – it’s painful on the vendor side too, dealing with dozens or hundreds of chapters with constantly rotating leaders. One idea in front of the Board is to get vendors to sign big checks, and distribute that money to the chapters.

Wayne’s first concern was to make sure that existing chapter-vendor relationships aren’t cannibalized. Wayne wants to recognize and continue what’s already working. This isn’t about stealing money from other chapters, but making it easier for chapters that aren’t doing it now. It might be a zero-sum game, and we can’t have the vendors saying, “I’m already spending $X for chapter sponsorships individually – I’ll just move that over to PASS nationally.”

From the vendor’s side, we have to be able to get a consistent message out nationally. If a vendor sponsors PASS nationally, they may want a consistent slide deck with vendor logos on the bottom or on the last slide. In the past, this has been difficult – speakers tend to bring their own slide decks. Chapter leaders have enough on their plates already without trying to strong-arm their speakers.

The Importance of Leaders and Consistency

Over and over during our talk, Wayne kept emphasizing the importance of the chapter leaders. He feels that there’s too much focus on the Board of Directors, and not enough focus on all the chapter leaders who do so much work. The Board, the President, and HQ are all just infrastructure components. He says the single most important thing PASS does as a whole is facilitate conversations between SQL Server professionals. It’s all about the chapter leader who brings good people together to meet once a month and have conversations with their friends. When someone needs a job, they need to be able to pick up the phone and call this network of friends they’ve built.

Unfortunately, though, PASS chapters are often built on the backs of heroic individuals. One person knocks themselves out to do everything – and it’s a lot of work building up a local chapter. When this one person tires out, moves away, or changes careers, the local chapter can be thrown into turmoil if someone doesn’t take up the reins with equal passion.

The PASS Board of Directors has a similar challenge. In the past, as new Board members get elected, there’s been some challenges with handing over duties and procedures from one Board member to the next. Some Board members have arrived only to hear, “Good luck with that!” as the old Board member leaves. In the last couple of years, Wayne and the Board have worked to establish procedures that make it easier to keep things on track as volunteer duties change. (I talked with Executive VP Bill Graziano about this as well, and my interview with him will come next.)

Like any other multi-million-dollar business, PASS requires a lot of day-to-day work to keep the lights on. Accounting, marketing, IT, and even just answering the phones – these tasks are all best done by permanent employees, not volunteers. Wayne puts it best when he says that all PASS members have day jobs that involve SQL Server. To perform these duties, PASS retains a management company with its own set of employees. This group is loosely called PASS HQ. Wayne sees their role as maintaining consistency between boards, and I agree that this group of permanent staff is especially important. When we’ve got a constantly rotating set of people at the top (the Board) and a constantly rotating set of people underneath (the chapter leaders), we need some glue to make sure ideas and plans stick.

Side note – this is where I get a little fuzzy – I’m not sure that HQ as mid-level management is the right vision for PASS. That’s not Wayne’s vision, mind you, I’m just struggling to figure out how I see HQ fitting in. It might help to have something as simple as an org chart for PASS so everyone can understand their role. I think people run for the PASS Board because they’ve done a great job of helping at the local level, and they want to contribute more, but there’s not a way to do that right now. You either lead a local chapter, lead a virtual chapter, or you run for the Board. I think there’s another tier of volunteering that we need to figure out, but I don’t know what it is yet.

Wayne’s Own Leadership

I asked Wayne what he was most proud of from his past year as PASS President. He said Steve Jones asked a similar question during the open Ask the Board session, and Wayne had originally struggled for an answer. Due to PASS’s inherent challenges (a democracy of DBAs), it’s difficult to come up with a vision and push your ideas across to others. He said that in the last year, he’s been the face of the community. People hunt him down to talk to him about their thoughts and ideas for the community at large. All day long at the PASS Summit, he’s been a central point of contact. (I can relate to that – I don’t think I walked twenty feet at the Summit without stopping to talk to somebody. There’s just so many great people with great ideas.)

I would suggest, though, that it’s much easier to get the community excited and aligned if you have a blog.

You can’t get people excited about your ideas if they can’t FIND your ideas.

If you want to be a truly effective leader in a volunteer organization, you need to have a platform where you can communicate your goals and your progress. Someone in your audience will find the idea mesmerizing and say, “I can help make that happen!” I’m even more of a believer in this after the PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter held our first PASS Summit breakfast event. Dylan Finney, Iain Knight, and Ken Simmons did all the hard work coordinating with our sponsor, VMware, our shirt vendors, and PASS HQ to build an awesome event. We had great turnout, lots of good questions from the audience, and a productive dialog. Personally, I didn’t do jack – I just laid out where I wanted to go, and these three guys carried the entire community there. Kudos and thanks to these guys, big time.

That’s the power of transparent communication, and that’s the one thing I think we’re lacking in the Board right now. From talking to Wayne and other Board members, I don’t have any qualms about what PASS has been up to lately. The more that we open PASS up, though, the more volunteers we’ll get, and the better decisions we’ll make.

In my next PASS Summit post, I’ll recap my interview with Bill Graziano, the current VP of Marketing.