Rotation in open source boards: Average # of years served by members

The ASF, PSF, and OSI keep renewing their board members. On average each member serves less than 8 years.

Meanwhile the FSF average # of years served per board members keeps growing — currently >13.83 years. Or more, if the count started before 2001.

Why boards should rotate

The following research articles show why institutions need to keep boards fresh, regardless if they are non-profit or not:

Rotating new board directors into the boardroom and on committees prevents the board from becoming stale. The IRS favors term limits because they believe that static board membership leads to unhealthy attitudes, which can cause boards to…

Eva Murray is a Tableau Zen master and a leader for #MakeOverMonday — and she just joined Snowflake! She loves data storytelling, and when she found thousands of datasets in the Snowflake Data Marketplace — she decided to take this challenge. We taped a call discussing her first 7 days of visualizations — and you can find it here:

Let’s check some of her visualizations and my thoughts:

The visualizations

Check TJ Murphy’s reaction when he discovered that Snowflake now has support for MATCH_RECOGNIZE:

Sample use case: Google Analytics e-commerce funnel with Snowflake

How would you answer this funnel question with SQL:

“We have an e-commerce shop. We need to identify sessions that land into the website from an arbitrary referrer (Instagram, Facebook, etc), and that end up buying something. How many steps did it take for these users to buy something, and how many times they tried to pay before success?”

That’s not an easy question to answer with plain SQL. But MATCH_RECOGNIZE finally gives us an elegant way to find answers to question like this one.

With MATCH_RECOGNIZE we can simply define the steps we…

This is a map that shows the most popular type of restaurant for each state around the US, and the pattern is clear — states around the East love pizza, states around the West love Mexican food:

But there are some exceptions:

• Idaho in the West prefers pizza.
• Louisiana in the South is all about cajun food.
• And Maine in the Northeast loves seafood.

To build this map I used the Foursquare Places premium dataset, through the Snowflake Data Marketplace. You can find my queries below.

This dataset includes more than 96 million places from all over…

World ranking

2021–03–11: Few countries have vaccinated more than 4% of their population. Gibraltar and Israel display outstanding numbers at almost 50%. They are followed by Seychelles (27%), Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Bahrain, USA, Serbia, Malta, Faeroe Islands, and Chile (6.64%).

What’s interesting about this query:

• Source is Our World in Data, and Starschema loads and shares this data in Snowflake.
• The owid_vaccinations table reports interesting statistics like # of daily vaccinations, % of population vaccinated, and the specific vaccines each country is using.
• To get only the latest day of data we use the qualify row_number()=1 instruction. This is especially important…

There are four questions that you could answer, each focusing on a different industry: financial services, healthcare, media & entertainment, and retail/CPG. For example, one of the questions is

“As a financial planner, your client has received a stipend of $1 million and has asked you to help them invest in foreign currency. Which currency would you choose and why?”

To answer this question, you should go to your Snowflake account (sign up for a free trial), and explore these Knoema datasets.

Knoema has collected thousands of different public datasets — and you can access them for free in…

There’s something about SQL and PIVOTs: Everyone wants to PIVOT their results, but there never seems to be an easy way for it. Fortunately, Snowflake users have a native way to perform pivots in SQL, with the function PIVOT():

select *
from (
  select * from table(result_scan(last_query_id(-1)))
)
pivot(max(pivot_value)
for pivot_column in ('Spider-Man', 'Wonder Woman', 'Iron Man'))

During 2020, more than 500 companies in the data and analytics space were acquired all over the world. Can you guess the top three cities where these companies are based?

Number three is London, number two is New York. And number one is San Francisco, where 33 companies in the data analytics space were acquired in 2020.