London Oracle Beers
London Oracle Beers is pretty much what it sounds like – a group of people based in or near London who are involved in Oracle Tech and like to meet up for beer and chat. Actually, you don’t need to like beer (some of us don’t drink any alcohol, but most of us do enjoy the odd pint of lager, cider or ale) but the meetings are always in a pub in central London.
It started up in late 2008 or early 2009 – it’s a little hard to say exactly when as, initially, it was myself, Doug Burns and Neil Chandler meeting for an evening {we knew each other via UKOUG events and other user group meetings} and occasionally others would join in. At some point it became regular enough and large enough (in terms of regular attendees) to become something of a self-sustaining event. After another year or two it got an unofficial name: London Oracle Beers or LOB. Who actually started the LOB? No single one of us, but it’s probably fair to say that Neil, Doug & I were the initial core and now it’s mostly Neil and I who keep it ticking over.
It’s a social oracle user group. We don’t have presentations, we don’t have membership and the Oracle content of the conversations can vary considerably! How often we meet also varies, it can be as little as a month between gatherings, it has occasionally been over 3 months. But everyone who comes along has an active interest in Oracle. Some of us are developers, some are DBAs, others sit somewhere between those two camps or in neither.
Anyone who has been along to the LOB can announce an event (as they have emails with everyone’s email address on it) and there are several people who do make the call, but usually it’s me. This is partly as some people are not happy calling for an event themselves (for various reasons) so they ask me to do so.
This page is not an advert to encourage people to join London Oracle Beers, it is more intended to highlight how easy it is to create a local, social user group yourself.
{Update, I have done a proper blog bost about such small, local user groups and some tips on how to get one up and running}
The LOB did get a little too large at one point and we had over 20 people turning up. That can make it a little tricky as (a) you have trouble fitting in the pub without annoying the other customers and (b) you stop being able to sit and chat with everyone you want to chat to that night without planning your table movements!
Thus as the moment I don’t add many people to the mail list I have, but friends of the group visiting London (especially if from abroad) can result in a LOB being called :-).
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