But it’s not always enough to wing it. If you’re going to do a pre-con at SQLRally or the PASS Summit where people will be paying good money to see you present, you need to have better than average presentation skills…not just technical skills. Or if you want to do an event keynote. Or move to being a paid trainer.

My friend Don Gabor is a member of the National Speakers Association, a group set up for speakers that make their living speaking (which excludes most of us!). But having something like that seems like a good idea, all the way from teaching the basics to mentoring to challenging all of us to take another step and not rest on our laurels.

So, that brings me to the idea of PASS sponsoring some speaker workshops, ongoing training, professional evaluations, and maybe some certifications/skill levels. I’ve taught a beginners course for speakers a few times in the past few years as we’ve tried to grow new speakers, and I think PASS sponsored curriculum for that would be great. It would also be nice if we trained professional evaluators (coaches?) to watch speakers at various events and give them specific feedback, far more detailed than they get from attendees.

Part of it paying dues to learn and earn the skills. Part of it making sure the newbies have a clear path to get in the game. Part of it is encouraging the best kind of competition – trying to be better than you are. Can we build something useful that would do this? Is there enough interest to drive this long term? Would it be perceived as a real benefit to PASS members? Would the Speaker logo look good on your resume?

I’d like to hear what you think. If there is enough interest then we can work on which ideas make sense and how to do them.

• How to qualify who gets help in terms of funding to speak
• Whether there is really a speaker shortage

I want to start with the second point. Is there a shortage of speakers? The honest answer is somewhere between “I don’t know” and “in some places”. For example, when we did a SQLSaturday in Tacoma about 2 years ago we struggled to find speakers, so there is (or at least was) a local shortage there. It could easily be that there are speakers we don’t know exist and that’s something our upcoming speaker bureau project hopes to address. My hunch is that in the rural/smaller urban areas we don’t have the speaker density we need. I’d like to see us at the point where we can stick a pin anywhere in the map (of the US, to start with) and find a dozen people within 200 miles that want to speak, and ideally it’s closer to 100 miles. I don’t think we’re there yet.

Providing funding for speakers is a big deal. We’ve either to go come up with some options to help out, or we have to build enough events within a reasonably driving distance that new speakers can afford to get some practice. Options?

• Speaker just tries to travel on the cheap, perhaps asking for a mid day session so they can drive over, present, drive back. Not the greatest, but probably lowest cost.
• We try to help lower costs by offering room share, ride from the airport, etc
• We build a fund and some way to decide who gets to use it
• We start to see speakers funded by vendors in our product space in return for demoing their product and/or staffing a table

I’m most interesting the latter two options. Let’s say we build a $20,000 speaker fund at PASS. We ask each chapter leader to recommend a local speaker for a sponsorship that would allow them to visit another group or SQLSaturday. We do the same for SQLSaturday event leaders. We compile that list, send out invitations offering to reimburse up to $250 in airfare or mileage to speak at an event at least 150 miles from their home. That won’t cover the entire cost of course, but it means they have a vested interest in managing the other variable expenses. In the best case we can identify and fund 80 speakers to get a second chance at presenting, speakers that their chapter/event leader have identified as credible.

It’s only a second chance, but it also means that we’d have a good chance at having each chapter or event get a mostly paid for out of town speaker. It’s a chance to feel the heat of presenting to total strangers, and the excitement of hitting the road as a ‘real’ speaker. I might have the details wrong, but my question to you is: would doing something like benefit the overall community?

The other point is about vendor funded speakers. We have a few now, mostly true employees of the vendors, but a few cases where it’s less formal. I think as long as there is disclosure, and the speakers are presenting a “real” session with a slide that indicates they were sponsored by Vendor X, there is no problem. In fact, I think it’s a real win. Vendors often struggle to get speakers to all the events, and covering a portion of travel costs might well be cheaper than keeping someone on staff.

I know I’m dreaming some, but I also see some of the growth and problems happening already. Think about what we (PASS + members) can do, think about what you can do. Are you scouting talent locally? Doing what you can to encourage/train them to take the next step? Maybe we need a prize for best talent scout!

Being mildly competitive, I have to admit I almost immediately thought – hey, this would be interesting for the SQL community. Then I remembered just how competitive many of us, and how good we are finding chinks in the rules, and started thinking I might spend a lot of time trying to un-game the system.

Would it work? What could we use for data points?

• # of Presentations (in minutes?) (more score for bigger events?) (or attendee based?)
• # of Blog posts/comments
• # of Twitter followers
• # of Books written (or how about # of words published?) (what about things like an SSC article?) (Do e-books count less or more?)
• # of minutes of video produced
• # of questions answered (what’s an answer?)
• # of network connections
• SQL Community service

See, I still like the idea! Data capture might be a challenge, but I wonder if I wouldn’t get most of it through the speaker bureau that I hope to build for PASS this year.

Of course it would be fun to try to be number one, but would it just be a game, or would it drive interest in participation that would really benefit the overall community?

But that’s not all of it. We need to keep the list off speakers fresh at our events, from chapter meetings to SQLSaturday to the PASS Summit. We need to push our best speakers to get better, and we need to have the next generation of speakers in the pipeline. We need a way to grow speakers so that we don’t have first time speakers at the Summit – we need a farm club system. We need new ideas and new presentation styles. We also need to bridge geography as best we can, get speakers from East cost to visit West coast, etc.

I think of speakers as falling into four categories:

• The “A” list – Paul Randal, Kim Tripp, Kalen Delaney, perhaps a few others. People with broad name recognition and deep experience
• The “B” list – speakers are that have participated in multiple events and have established a reputation (to some degree!). For example, I’d put myself in this bucket, and most speakers that speak at the Summit.
• The “C” list – speakers that have participated in only one or two events, usually a presentation at a chapter
• The rest – those who haven’t done a presentation yet!

We’ve started the farm club system by building SQLSaturday, now we just need to expand it. That should over time expand the C list and some of those will migrate to the B list. We need to look for the talent and offer encouragement and mentoring where we can, understanding that not everyone wants to move up (and that’s not wrong). The upcoming speaker bureau should also have an impact on this, making it easier for new speakers to identify unfilled niches in the SQLscape.

So we’re making progress there, what’s left?

We need to find a way to make the spots at the Summit more competitive to make sure there is a growth path for people moving to the B list. I think the program committee does ok at this, but I’m in favor of implementing a policy that says no one speaks at 3 Summits in a row. But at least we should make sure that 20-30% are first time Summit speakers (but not first time speakers).

More importantly though, going from C list to B list requires practice, and that practice requires travel. Most events don’t have the budget to cover travel costs, so it’s self funded and that often makes it prohibitive even when the desire is there. What can we do?

• Encourage event leaders to help reduce the costs of those travelling in – work on room sharing at a hotel, try to place speakers with local members to save the hotel cost, pickup/return to airport to save rental car
• Set up a system of grants or scholarships. I’m thinking of something like raising $10,000 a year to start with, picking 40 speakers to be given a $250 grant to be used to attend a SQLSaturday that requires travel. It wouldn’t cover all the cost, but it might cover most of the airfare.

Thinking about the speaker bureau I worry that the A list gets bombed with requests, who invites the C list? If the people on the C list showed up as having a grant, then chapters/events would be fighting to get those, because it would be an out of town speaker.

I think this is ambitious, but important. So far it’s my idea, not something adopted by PASS, and it needs some work before we get to that point. But it’s good to be ambitious, because we can grow PASS and grow the state of our craft by building a system that encourages the best and brightest to participate – and they in turn educate, mentor, and role model for the next generation.

Definitely hoping for comments and contrarian views on this.