This week is the PASS Summit and it has me thinking about all of the amazing work done in our community by volunteers. If you are at Summit look around and you’ll see people all over the place volunteering their time to help direct people where they need to go, answer questions, help the speakers with technical problems etc.

If you’ve been to a SQL Saturday it’s all volunteer run. I can’t even imagine how much work it is to find enough sponsors to pay for things like the venue, subsidizing lunch, snacks etc. Not to mention finding the venue and a caterer. Then think about going through all of the speaker submissions to try to pick the ones that they feel will provide the most benefit to the community. Then organizing the sessions and picking rooms that will fit the expected crowd (you need a slightly larger room for a Brent Ozar or a Kimberly Tripp than you would for me for example). Then you have the people who stuff information bags, take tickets, etc. And I’ll bet you never thought about the fact that the whole area has to be cleaned up afterwards.

I could go on talking about 24 hours of PASS, users groups, virtual user groups etc, but I’m rambling a bit. In the end, there is an incredible amount of work this community puts in to educate each other. So take a few minutes and think about what it means to you and find a few of those amazing volunteers and thank them. And maybe think about joining in as you can.