How I Put My Collaborate Agenda Together

The Collaborate 2013 conference is in less than a week. Most of us are busy putting together our individual agendas for what is shaping up to be a very exciting week. There are so many interesting sessions to choose from! Conference organizers kindly introduced a Show Planner to make planning a bit easier, but in this blog post, I will share with you how I created my agenda for Collaborate.

Disclaimer: It is easy to miss some very interesting sessions. Sessions that I may be interested in will not meet your profile. Please use your own judgement and do not rely 100% on my approach.

Explore sessions from strong technical companies

I have enjoyed working at Pythian  for almost 4 years now; in fact, I will celebrate 42 months working at Pythian during Collaborate :). However, there is something else that I would like to talk about here. Pythian is one of very few companies that support and encourage their employees to stand up and speak about the exciting things they deal with on a day-to-day basis. As a result, 9 Pythian employees will deliver 16 sessions at Collaborate this year.  So if you, like me, are after great technical content from seasoned professionals, then add some Pythian sessions to your Collaborate 2013 agenda.

Pythian isn’t the only company that encourages their employees to share knowledge and that invests heavily in Oracle Community programs. There are many others; however, I would like to mention the 2 companies that are at the top of my list:

• Dbvist – I am glad to see that Arjen (the founder) and his crew are part of Collaborate this year. The content they deliver is very good.
• Enkitec – I personally love to listen to these speakers.

In the comments section of this blog post, please do not hesitate to share information about other good companies that contribute to the Oracle Community and are part of the Collaborate 2013.

Remember the past

Another tip for putting together a great agenda for Collaborate 2013 is to see if speakers you’ve enjoyed listening to at previous conferences are returning this year. You can find my memories about last year’s conference under the following blog post Collaborate 12: Speakers I’d like to hear again.

Attend RACSIG & RAC Attack events

I am glad to inform you that RAC Special Interest Group and RAC Attack are part of Collaborate 2013 again this year. Traditionally, RAC Attack has been a place where people with expert technical skills meetup. I don’t expect Collaborate 2013 to be any different. You can find information about RAC Attack sessions here.

RACSIG is organizing several sessions including RAC Experts Panel, Oracle Database Appliance Customer Panel and RAC SIG Birds of a Feather. I am part of the RACSIG board, and we have put together a list of RAC-related sessions (here) to make your search efforts a bit easier.

Additional sources

There are several other sources I have used to build my Collaborate 2013 agenda. Some of them are listed below:

• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OAUG Collaborate 13 – A list of Oracle Apps ATG  sessions kindly put together by Steven Chan’s team (the author of the blog post is Max Arderius).
• COLLABORATE 13 – IOUG Forum Virtual Conference – The conference organizers are running a virtual conference this year. I bet they have invested some effort to put together a good agenda for it.
• Collaborate speakers/participants on Twitter – Use Twitter to set up in-person meetings with people you’ve met via social media.
• Oracle ACEs presenting at Collaborate – Oracle ACEs are known for their contribution to Oracle Community. They tend to deliver good content ;) {added on 2013.04.02}

As with any blog post, it is very easy to miss mentioning someone. I did my best to avoid naming specific sessions with the exception of panels and SIG meetings. My intention was to give you some hints on how to build your Collaborate agenda. Please do not hesitate to add some additional references and tips at the end of this post.

See you in Denver soon folks,

Yury