When 24 Hours Is Not Enough

Many of you have some awareness regarding the 24 Hours of PASS events that I have helped to promote previously. When I was asked to help arrange for the upcoming event I targeted the list of current Summit speakers. This made logical sense to me since we want to make it a Summit preview. So I went ahead and sent out invitations to about 70 people, had roughly half of those respond, and then another percentage of those people managed to get me their abstract, bio, and headshots by the deadline.

In short, the end result is that I had about 28 or so people with all their stuff ready to go. I had to choose four of those to be alternates. That decision was mine and mine alone (more on that later).

About two days after I had made the final schedule I was notified that I neglected to include a subset of Summit speakers. See, the Microsoft speakers are chosen after the Community speakers. That means I never invited them to take part in the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS event. And since they are as much a part of the Summit as anyone else, it seemed fair to include them. But the schedule was already set, so how could I get them involved? It didn’t seem fair to push four Community speakers aside in order to make up for my oversight. Two wrongs don’t make a right, right?

As luck would have it, we had already decided to switch up the schedule for the event. Instead of 24 straight hours we split the sessions into two days of 12 hours each which meant we had room to insert extra sessions. We decided to insert sessions at the end of each day so as to not disrupt the current schedule in any way. This way we can give a true preview of the Summit, we just needed 28 hours to get it all done!

We will get the registration open soon enough and will notify everyone when you can sign up for these extra sessions.

Now…about that session selection process…I want to change things entirely for next time. I am kicking around some ideas, but whatever we do will involve the Community in some way. Right now I am thinking we should have the Community pick the sessions and speakers they most want to hear. Not sure how to make it all happen, but the idea of a “24 Hours of PASS: Community Choice” sounds real good. Maybe we could do it American Idol style and have rounds of voting until we get down to 24 finalists…

Lastly, this is my 500th blog post. That’s a whole lot of writing without really saying anything. Thanks for reading and thanks to everyone that ever felt motivated to leave a comment.