Guest RieMerritt Posted August 23, 2022 Posted August 23, 2022 The Azure Data Community Council has spent much of the last 18 months establishing the guard rails for how the Council would work. From establishing a meeting cadence, to how meetings progress, how the community can reach them with questions or feedback and even establishing a member’s term. In early May 2022, we opened applications to replace Board/Council members that had reached the end of their term. We explained the role, responsibilities, and requirements. We laid out how the application and selection process would work. Requirements to join the Council were: Must be in a leadership role in a current Azure Data Community User Group. Must be able to sign an NDA with Microsoft. Must not be a Microsoft employee. Experience in organizing a community event is not required, but is preferred. We received some great applications from interested community leaders from around the world, from small groups and large, with event organizing & board experience or those just starting out in minor leadership roles. We picked our top candidates and held interviews. We watched interviews, read applications, met to discuss candidates on several occasions and made decisions based on what the board needs now and what they’ll need in the coming six to twelve months. I am confident the board made amazing choices. Who we are: Michael Johnson (https://twitter.com/MikeJohnsonZA) is a Business Intelligence architect and Microsoft data platform MVP living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Michael has been working with data for the last 15 years and has run the local SQL Server User Group and SQL Saturday conference event for the last few years. He enjoys showing people new tools and technologies that allow them to work more effectively with their data. Deborah Melkin (https://twitter.com/dgmelkin) has been working as a database professional with SQL Server for almost 20 years. She spends her days helping programmers with all aspects of database design, queries, performance, and deployment. In 2016, she began her blog, Deb the DBA. Soon after that, she began speaking at SQL Saturdays and user groups. Deborah is a board member of the New England SQL Server User group (NESQL). She was named as an IDERA ACE Class of 2020, is a Friend of Redgate, and won Speaker Idol at PASS Summit 2019. Deborah is also a Microsoft MVP for the Data Platform. In her spare time, Deborah can usually be found doing something musical. Hemantgiri Goswami (http://www.twitter.com/hemantgirig) is a seasoned SQL Server Consultant with a demonstrated history of 23+ years. He is a published author specializing in High Availability and Disaster Recovery area. His mission statement is to help organizations make their SQL Server more reliable, and efficient. He is awarded the Most Valuable Professional award by Microsoft 6 times. He is a regular speaker at events in Surat, India under the banner of SQLPASS and CSI Chapter for Surat. One of the learning experiences we had as part of the application and review process, was that we’ve done a really bad job of communicating to you all exactly what we’ve been working on since we started in early 2021. We’re committed to doing a better job about that. This begins with an Azure Data Community Newsletter to be published every other month. We’ll keep you up to date on what we’ve done, what we’re planning and hopefully, provide opportunities for you all to contribute. Since this is the first newsletter of many to come, we’ll hit the highlights on what we’ve done during the last year. What we’ve done: We created a landing page for the community Azure Data Community | Microsoft. There you can locate a user group, find community created resources like blogs, pod casts, forums, and find upcoming data events. We created a way for you to reach the Azure Data Community Council with any questions or feedback. Microsoft Forms In addition to requiring all ADC groups maintain, publish and enforce their own Code of Conduct, we published a User Group leader Code of Conduct that all incoming applications must agree to abide by. We partnered with Data Platform MVP & community organizer, Ben Weissman, to help connect those who wanted to get started speaking with seasoned speakers looking to give back. Microsoft Forms Additionally, we solicited sessions to build a Speaker Improvement Library to help you get started speaking. While the motivation of this effort was to increase diversity in conference speakers, anyone that wants to speak would benefit from sessions on creating an abstract, hosting a successful panel, creating accessible sessions and much more. See the announcement and the results. We created a way for organizers of Data Platform focused events & conferences to submit their upcoming event for inclusion on our Data Community Landing Page as well as Call for Speaker information. Microsoft Forms We are putting together a “How to” wiki on subjects to make the job of organizer easier, like finding, setting up or running a local user group, setting up and running a virtual user group, running a call for speakers, finding sponsors, etc. We are planning on publishing this soon. If you have any ideas on any “How to’s “ you’d like to see, please let us know. These are not hard a fast rules on what you should do but advice on guidance on what can help. Finally, we spent a great deal of time building the road we’re going to drive on. Since this was a brand-new effort, we had to establish how this was going to work going forward. We needed rules around what we do, what we don’t do, how we replace board members and so on. The foundation we laid here will serve the community for many years to come. What we’re focused on next: The Azure Data Community Council identified a few initiatives to focus our energies in the coming year. We’re still dedicated to supporting diversity in the community via speaking opportunities and education, to connecting the council with the data community and helping support a robust thriving community, we think we can do more. Our initiatives this year start with communication. We’ll do a better job of keeping you in the loop on what we’re doing. We want to grow the network. We recognize that there are regions and areas where we’re underrepresented. One of the issues creating a gap is the use of Meetup to organize your group. We’re looking to expand the Community outside the bounds of Meetup to include groups that use Facebook, LinkedIn, their own webpage, or other means to organize. That means, if you’re a user group that’s focused on the Microsoft data platform, meets the established criteria for inclusion, hosting 6 meetings a year and have a published code of conduct, then soon you’ll be able to submit your group for inclusion in the network. It's important to have a Code of Conduct established for your group, and it's equally important to have guidelines for how to enforce it. The Advisory Council won’t dictate how events respond to a code of conduct violation; we’re here to support your efforts by offering organizers the tools and resources you need to be prepared when a violation occurs. We’ll be working to collect resources, guidelines, actions, and examples so that each event isn’t starting over at zero. Our goal is to make events a safe place for all attendees, and we can help you do that by providing a playbook that contains a library of resources for you to use to create your own policy. Continue reading... Quote
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