This Autumn, I am mostly being a Conference Tart.

The first half of this year was a little quiet for me on the presenting front. I was concentrating on writing and also on organising events, as opposed to going to them, so most of my trips were for personal reasons (that means “holidays”…). I presented at the Ireland conference and a few UK user group events but that was it – quite a few European events this spring fell on dates I was not available (including the Israeli and Finnish conferences where I was asked to attend and would have loved to). Or, oh the shock of it, my submissions were not accepted! {How dare they 🙂 )

However, the final third of this year is the total opposite. I’m at a conference at least once each month from September to the end of the year. In the spring this year I decided to make up for my poor showing speaker-wise by offering talks to a few more events. I knew I would probably do Oracle OpenWorld as, being an Ace Director, the Oracle OTN program is incredibly kind to us and help us attend the conference itself and the ACED briefings just beforehand. Despite my best efforts to scupper my own chances of attending OOW16 (I did not respond to an email I should have for ACED and I only submitted technical talks and not fluffy cloud ones) the ACE program have sorted me out and I’ll be there. I’m not presenting (unless my status as standby for the EOUG lightning talks and OakTable World morph into actual slots) but it’s nice to do a conference with no duties.

In December it is the total opposite for UKOUG Tech16. This is “My” conference, as in not just my home conference and the one I nearly always present at, it is the one I help organise. This year I am the project lead for Tech16, rather than the Database community lead role that I filled for the last two years. It sounds like a promotion and it sort-of is, but in reality there is less work than being a community lead, as I have a lot less to do with organising the content and agenda. But I will have duties to do at the event as well as the one presentation I am doing (I keep it down to one presentation when I have other responsibilities) so for me it is quite a demanding conference.

Between these two book-ends I decided to offer talks to DOAG in Germany and I was asked to speak at the Slovenian and Croatian user groups, which I was delighted to do. DOAG accepted two of my submissions so that was 5 conferences, which is a nice number.

Then the Polish user group announced their next conference and I had promised “the other ORA600” to submit for that one. Then last week I was asked to consider doing the Nordic OTN tour. I said yes to both. The Nordic OTN tour is not finalised yet but it looks like it could be 3 or 4 meetings in different countries on consecutive days.

On top of this, my wife is relocating to Switzerland in October for work and I’ll be trying to assist with that. So I’ve had to put together a spreadsheet of where and when I’ll be. It’s all rather busy. It would be foolish to add to all of this.

So I plan to submit to the Autumn Bulgarian conference too because, well, it’s a cracking conference.

The saving grace? Most of the conferences I am going to have asked me to do the same presentations. So I only need to prepare 3 (or is it 4… I’ll check my spreadsheet).

Why do I do all these conferences? Because (a) I actually like presenting and sharing what I know and (b) I meet people and make new friends. So, if you are at any of the above events, come over and say “hi”.

I suppose I should update my “Appearances and Meetings” page.