pdvfirstblog: About ACE program, Conferences, and Dev-Rel

The oracle “community” has been buzzing about the ACE program.

Firstly I want to Welcome all the new+promoted ACE-es. I know some of you personally, and I am glad to have you on board. Hope to meet in person (again) soon.

But given some of the discussions I’ve seen, I’ll briefly do 4 statements, will elaborate each of them in text below and end with some final thoughts. My aim is to help the discussion, without popping a load of less-relevant text into tweet-threads or slack-channels.

Statement 1: Neutral.

I want to encourage objective, independent information about IT, tools, products, usage, practices etc… And I want to stand with the user/developer/sysadmin, not with the vendors. But I am OK to provide feedback and suggestions to vendors, some of my friends do Good Work in the employment of vendors.

Statement 2: In-Person.

I want to encourage in-person meetings, of both large and small groups. Communication is simply more complete when done in person. All other networking (online, stackoverflow, youtube, zoom etc) will also just happen and grow. But I dont want to comment too much about "online" now.

Statement 3: No bribes to speakers.

As an independent conference-customer and sometimes speaker, I dont want money from a Vendor, not even “travel and lodging”. As such, I am Happy with oracle cutting the travel-funding for ACE-Ds.

Statement 4: Transparancy.

A Vendor-sponsored event will be biased, but I may still come to the event. I want organizers to be transparent about their funding. A sponsored-event can still provide good opportunities for in-person meeting and exchange of real information. A clever and wise vendor will understand.

So far the TL;DR part. I will elaborate for the curious in text below.

The Elaborations...

Caveats:

- Some ppl will disagree. Please Keep exchanging Ideas, politely.

- I make assumptions, and the usual ass-u-me applies, so be it.

- I have my own “desired state”, and I probably reason towards that.

Stmnt 1 Neutral.

This one, Neutrality, is the most difficult; What is Objective, neutral information ?

In the IT landscape, “neutral” is probably whatever you + I say is “neutral”.

But I would add the criterium that the information given is verifiable, demonstrable, or measurable.

Where do you find Neutral information ?

From users /Developers ?

From testing and benchmarks (can of worms….)?

In University and Scientific institutions ?

In the market : whichever product survives the longest, or sells the most licences is the bests ?

This "neutral" item needs expanding, maybe later… Compare for example how the pg-day organisation tries to enforce rules and transparency for conferences under that brand. Or the Oak-Table-Network of “scientists”. I think the oakies had some good criteria, but also a self-proclaimed high consumption of alcohol, and a vetting process for members that could depend on "who pays for drinks tonight”.

Stmnt 2 : in-person meetings.

I specifically want to encourage in-person meetings, because I think the in-person communication is the most complete. As someone said during dinner in Vienna: “We could never have discussed all this over zoom”.

In-person needs encouraging, sponsoring, because all other forms of information-exchange will simple happen anyway. There are very few restrictions on creating online-groups, forums, listings and more. In Database-land, Twitter seems to be the platform of choice, followed by Stack-Overflow etc. The moderations of blogs, aggregators, forums and mailing-lists is a different topic, but I will try to subscribe to “neutral” ones as well as to vendor-driven ones.

In-person or “Physical” conferences and meetup need some sponsoring because venue, food, transport, lodging all require a budget. And this is where Oracle “helped” in the past: they did not only send “employees”, but they used to sponsor some of the other speakers as well, the ACE-Ds.

My controversial stmnt here is: Only sponsor Organizers, don't Sponsor Speakers. See als stmtn3: don't pay the ppl, pay the event.

I also think that only “small events” need explicit support. Larger, professional events, (UKOUG, DOAG, Buildstuff) do not need a lot of artificial “vendor sponsoring”. They are able to draw sufficient crowd and sponsors to run on their own. The smaller events act as proving-ground and training-space for the larger ones. For this reason I want to visit both types of events: small meetup/groups and large conferences. Compare it to a football-fan who likes to see both the local amateurs and the professional teams, and who knows the sport can only exist with both types of clubs.

From this reasoning, it follows that the attendees (delegates?), will have to pay some fee to participate in most events. This means not everyone will be able to visit, but it also means you end up with the more motivated, and spending-power audience. A free event (as in free beer) attracts way too much freeloaders like myself: I only go to conferences for the food and drink.

For small events, it may be as simple as paying for your travel and own food+drink at the venue, but some meetups/user-groups would definitely benefit form some dev-rel-funding or marketing-budget (e.g. the old oracle ACE-funding).

Supporting evidence:

Firstly, the ppl that met in-person before Covid still seem to form a fairly good network, and

Secondly, the existence of both commercially and voluntarily organised, physical conferences proved there is a market, a demand for them. My intention was generally to seek-out the more “neutral” and serious conferences and go there to meet ppl and learn information.

In the Postgres world, I know the local meetups in NL were quite successful. But they benefitted from a few large “installed base” customers that made venue and food available for meetings of up to 100 ppl. Those “users” noticed the direct and indirect benefit of keeping a user-community alive, even if this did not bring them immediate measurable revenue (oracle + cstmers take note - I never see a large “financial institution” hosting an OUG of 100 ppl!)

Stmnt 3: No Bribes. Don't pay speakers, pay the (small) events.

When a vendor pays (or reimburses) the speaker and this is not explicitly clear (e.g. ACE-D funding), the message becomes biased. Even if the speaker tries hard to remain neutral. If the Organizer (and thus the audience) pays for the speaker, it is a more transparant and more a system of demand+supply, and therefore more Neutral, IMHO.

I would try to ensure that the whole setup of a conference stems from the demand + supply. The more a vendor pays (visibly or invisibly), the less neutral the event is going to be. I accept that some organizers will pay for “rock star speakers” (Hoogland, McDonald, Lewis etc…), because those speakers draw in the crowds, and that is fine. But if the money comes from the event or from the attendees, there is more room for neutral or critical views, and possibly better information, just saying…

Stmnt 4: Transparency.

vendor-organised events are biased.

Hence, please make it clear when a vendor pays for the event or for some of the speakers.

This doesn;t need much elaboration. At least be transparant: you want to know who is paying for the event.

But I might still use the opportunity to meet with like-minded ppl, and to gain as much information as I can. There may still be a whole off-stage or informal gathering going on at the same time (e.g. the Tap-n-Spile in Birmingham during UKOUG).

Final thoughts.

Looking back at it all... It comes down to : Honest and Neutral information, and “meeting ppl”.

For “honest information”, it may mostly be a matter of educating IT staff to think critical, ask quesitons, and put the interest of user/customer first.

But Also, to help see through the BS (Who remembers : You probably don't need…. ).

For meeting ppl: You will always depend on funding and motivated ppl. But I am of the opinion that transparency and “serendipity” can only occur if ppl can see each other in the eyes from time to time.

Of course, I also wrote this whole text to improve my hopes/chances of riding around europe by motorcycle, visiting events, meeting ppl…

(insert picture of motor with view over Silezia: Some ppl only go to POUG for the beer… )