The neverending controversy over PASS elections
It seems that everyone and his brother is blogging about the recent PASS elections.
While I agree with Geoff Hiten that choosing three spots for four candidates is essentially a final elimination round of musical chairs, I think the remaining criticism of this process has gone way overboard in a lot of cases. People involved with PASS often only peripherally are making statements that nominees should be thoroughly vetted, must be certified SQL Server experts, need to have been born on a Tuesday morning, etc. While some of these things are valuable, I don’t think they are essential
As a comparison, think about SQL Server itself. How many of the product and/or strategic decisions about the platform are made by people who have any clue whatsoever about how the platform works? Don’t get me wrong; SQL Server has come a *long* way, and a lot of the decisions are great. Several decisions, though, not so much. Does that make SQL Server a bad thing? No, but it certainly makes it balanced, and allows for people with different stakes to work together to provide overall direction for the platform, hopefully for the collective good of all involved — the company, its employees, their customers, end users, and folks who support the platform indirectly, be it on newsgroups, or web forums, or StackOverflow / ServerFault.
Nothing terribly insightful here (Kevin Kline had a lot more to say about this), but I wanted to throw my comments in the ring before the results were announced. :-)
