2012
EMEA User Group Leaders Meeting Latvia May 2012
By: Tom Scheirsen
EMEA User Group Leaders Meeting Latvia, Riga – 22/23 May 2012
Objectives and facts
From 22-23 May 2012, 40 user group leaders from 24 countries participated in the EMEA user group leaders’ meeting in Latvia, Riga. The main objective was to share ideas, best practices and seeking for any collaboration across user groups. In total 61 people attended the meeting, 25 Oracle user group leaders, 14 Java user group leaders, 1 MySQL community leader and 21 Oracle colleagues (speakers, liaisons and staff)
Countries in the room: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom
Potential Reach Out
The attending leaders reach out to over 200,000 users in EMEA. The participating leaders to this meeting agreed to work together across borders but also plans were made between Oracle user groups and Java groups
Local Welcome
The meeting was opened by the country leader of Latvia, Mr Guntis Kalnins. On top of that we had also the pleasure to have a film crew onsite to interview some leaders, truly inspiring interviews. Great video for the Oracle program, Infinite Red potential
Roundtable
Following the opening remarks we organized a roundtable. Each user group leader prepared an introduction slide and had the chance to introduce themselves and their user group. A great way to open the meeting and the foundation of the most important objective of this meeting: NETWORKING
Social Media
Later that morning, Sam Hall (EMEA communications director) was virtually plugged in to the meeting via Skype. A risky but calculated action, considering that the topic was about social media and how user groups could be linked to all kind of social media tools. A great overview of Sam on social media tools Oracle use and how we increase our business through these lines of communication.
Breakout Sessions
At day 1 and 2, break-out sessions gave the attendees to focus on their habitat. On the menu we had presentations on engineered systems (Owen Hughes), Fusion Applications (Rajan Krishnan), Java hands on sessions (Simon Ritter, Cecilia Borg and Tomas Nilsson) and MySQL sessions with Serge Frezefond. One of the break-out sessions was also about the EOUC, were the leaders of the Oracle user groups had the chance to discuss topic/challenges they face and how to improve situations
Marketing
Our marketing colleagues Joyce Boland and Ruth Collett presented a very compelling slide deck about how marketing works. The focus, marketing will have on campaigns for the next 6 months (apps/tech/hw) and about the next actions on developer marketing
Unconf Sessions
During the afternoon of day 1, we organized 2 unconference sessions. These are participant driven sessions led by the leaders on topics they nominated and voted for. Eight topics were selected:
- How can Facebook and Twitter (social media) support us in increasing attendees to conferences?
- Adopt a JSR / Adopt OpenJDK
- Q&A with Java groups, what is the difference between traditional user groups and their engagement model?
- How can Oracle Support and the User Groups work together to improve the end user experience?
- Managers and technology people in the user group activities - together or separately?
- Junior Education Program for university students
- Scaling your user group - problems and solutions
- User group financial models - which one is the best?
4 Minutes' Pitch
Day 1 was closed with the “4 minutes’ pitch”. User group leaders had 4 minutes to present their best user group practices. Same as the unconference sessions, attendees could put their topics forward and the others voted. Only the top 10 with highest votes could present. We were also counting down the time, so the speaker was forced to stop talking after 4 minutes.In total we did 10 pitches. Examples: User group impact on local IT industry, Why OUGs and JUGs should interact more, How do we as a UG encourage members to collaborate and share success stories with the community ?, …
Next Steps
User group leaders meeting in San Francisco (HQ) will be the last week of January.
Please review your user group profile on www.iouc.org to make sure that all information is still valid
For more detailed information, please contact tom.scheirsen@oracle.com
Keywords: Events | IOUC | Oracle | 2012 | EOUC | Latvia
