And then just on a personal level, because vendors are so important to the success of PASS, anytime I spoke about a vendor, I mentioned my employer but then I also gave thanks to Red Gate [Software], Imceda, xkoto, to CA, to everybody. I made it clear that I'm wearing the hat as PASS's president and we love all of you guys, and we want to make all of you successful selling to this group of people. We want to make everyone in this group of people SQL Server professionals—we want to make you their chosen one. I always tried to play as fair as I could, make it as above board as I could, so that everybody benefitted in the old "rising tide raises all boats" mantra that was sort of carried through. But it was definitely something that we knew could be an issue and we spent a lot of time thinking about it.
Moran: For my next question, I wasn't sure if I wanted to phrase it as "What's next for Kevin?" or "Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?", so you can answer it either way.
Kline: No, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I do know that I need to take a sabbatical for awhile. So I need to take a little time off to rest and recuperate, but I also know that I'm a rather restless soul, and I think like yourself and like quite a few other people in the world, I'm not the kind of person that's just content to do a 9-5 job and that's all I do or all I think about. So I know there'll be more. It could be something like volunteering more at my church, could be something much more global or a much larger organizational sort of thing. I don't know what it is yet, but yeah, there's definitely more.
Moran: Where does PASS need to be in five years, and then 10 years? You've been around for 10 years—where should it be the next 10 years?
Kline: I've kind of beat this drum before in the past. PASS right now is great about touching on the technology side of being an IT professional/SQL Server professional. I think it needs to develop much more in terms of the first letter in its acronym, on the professional side of things. Much more needs to happen in terms of helping people progress through their careers. Many people don't stay a technologist their whole life—maybe they start as a developer or support person and become a DBA, then they become a BI analyst, and BI has business in its name, so maybe they then move into the business and become an owner of a major component of the business. So we need to help people move through those different stages of their career, not just this one, seven-year period of your career. We need to help you become a much better professional across the board, and help you raise your game in a number of ways.
So that's one big thing I see changing. Another—and again, going back to your earlier question—is I really see Web 2.0 becoming a much bigger element of PASS. Much more content streamed, much more availability for comment and discussion, for people giving something three stars or five stars or no stars. A lot more collaboration. One of the things that I think has already been great about PASS is the way the community really pulls together, and I think we're going to see that become even more dynamic and even more, as Amir Nazim says, more "alluring" and attractive and pulls in even more people. We know that there's this group of people that everyone's invited to come and discuss. I think we'll see more of that in the future.
Moran: Have the various technologies and social media networking spaces impacted the way PASS works?
Kline: There's no question. Definitely. And I don't mean to be critical, but in some ways the leadership of the organization has been somewhat insular, and by no one's fault, just that our older methods of communicating were slower and it was a little harder to get that information. If I had a great idea, it was harder to get that into the board, then get someone to sponsor that idea, make a proposal, turn that into an action plan, and carry it all out. Now those things can happen much much faster through social networking. I think that PASS is going to make some smart bets, put some resources in the right places, and we're going to start to see that bear fruit.