Dear DataSaturdays and SQLSaturday Teams,
It’s time to unite the forces, it’s time to unite community effort product under one brand – let’s call it DataSQLSaturday, tentatively. We are all friends and part of the same #sqlfamily, so let’s make it happen for the sake of the community.
What did we originally have?
Prior to 2021, all SQL Saturday events were using SQLSaturday.com web site.
What do we have now?
As of November 2021, we have 2 platforms to serve the SQL Saturday event, the one-day free to attend Microsoft Data Platform community: https://datasaturdays.com and https://sqlsaturday.com. Both are practically identical web sites that are built on top of GitHub plumbing (pioneered by the DataSaturday Team). At the moment, all European event organizers are using DataSaturdays.com, while most of North American organizers are using SQLSaturday.com.
Why did it happen? Why do we have 2 almost identical products?
In a vacuum of a PASS sunset which effectively took down the old sqlsaturday.com web site, DataSaturdays.com has emerged as the only platform available for SQL Saturday organizers. If you were planning to organize an event in 2021, DataSaturdays.com was your only choice (excluding the option to create your own domain and web site). This was all true prior to April 2021, when the new sqlsaturday.com reemerged (thanks to RedGate) while receiving the same GitHub features. As you probably already figured, some SQL Saturday organizers went to DataSaturdays.com platform while some stayed with the SQLSaturday.com platform.
DataSaturdays.com and SQLSaturday.com platforms
In all fairness, both DataSaturdays.com and SQLSaturday.com are not real platforms, but rather a mishap of single HTML page with everything else sourced from real platforms like EventBrite, Sessionize, Email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Online Forms like Microsoft Forms, and PayPal to enable collection of sponsorship fees.
What would it take for both Teams to unite?
In my opinion, DataSaturdays Team (Rob Sewell, Gianluca Sartori, and more (see Fig #1)) need to agree with SQLSaturday (Steve Jones, Andy Warren, and more (see Fig #2)) on the terms. Both Teams would need to come up with a strategy to combine forces to benefit the data community, but both Teams need to see enough community interest, so please voice your opinion here – https://github.com/sqlcollaborative/DataSaturdays/discussions/252.
As a reconciliation price, I would gladly donate my https://www.datasqlsaturday.com domain! 🙂
DataSteve 