PASS Provides an Updated Speaker Contract

The PASS Board has provided an updated Speaker Contract prior to announcing Summit speakers at the end of this month. In his post on the PASS Blog titled Improving the Speaker Contract, PASS president Adam Jorgensen provides a link to a PDF of the new contract and invites comments.

Adam notes clauses 14, 15, and 16; shown here:

My thoughts:

• First: Kudos to PASS Leadership for responding in such a timely manner!
• Item 14 – especially the last sentence – allows presenters to build their brands while increasing the value of their contributions to both the Community and the PASS Summit, provided the scripts and tools are free and do not require registration or email.
• Item 15 bans sharing branded stuff “outside of your designated session room(s)” and permits “one-on-one” exchanges that occur as a result of normal networking.
• Item 16 is polite housekeeping. If you put stuff (that’s allowed by item 14) out, please clean it up.

In my opinion, this is a set of compromises that seeks to balance concerns expressed by the Community with concerns expressed by Summit exhibitors. Some things to note:

• Free tools or scripts need to be available somewhere where there is no registration or email required. I’m not sure how this applies to open source projects – like those hosted at github. I’m pretty sure people need to register to join an open source project hosted at github. I wonder about that, especially since item 14 specifically mentions “Open Source” in its language. My suggestion: Remove the registration/email restriction language from item 14. Some platforms require (or will require in the future) registration of some kind. Presenters have no control over the policies of these platforms. I think this is going to be difficult for PASS (or anyone, although I am certain some will try) to police and impossible to enforce with equity. In my opinion, this is a recipe for more complaints.
• I think I understand the balance PASS is trying to achieve. I think they’re saying, “If you want to collect email addresses, sponsor.” I have mixed emotions about this limitation on personal brand-building (see Adam Machanic’s first comment on this post), but I believe this is an effort to preserve the value of sponsoring for both PASS and the sponsors.
• In my opinion, item 16 definitely leans towards presenter brand-building, and therefore towards the Community. It also benefits sponsors by making the Summit more valuable, increasing the value of their sponsorship dollar.

All in all, I am impressed with PASS’ leadership on this issue. Kudos!

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