This is a guest blog by Oracle ACEs Jasmin Fluri, Julian Frey and Gianni Ceresa
The Swiss Oracle User Community (SwissOUC) organized and ran its first conference at the end of January: it has been an exciting, but tiring journey.
The conference is the latest achievement of a very young group founded by five ACEs in September 2020: Jasmin Fluri, Julian Frey, Gianni Ceresa, Flora Barriele, and Christian Berg. In the meantime, two of the founders, Flora and Christian, joined Oracle, but while not part of the board of SwissOUC anymore they are still helping as volunteers.
We all are speakers at various conferences and have previous experiences in organizing in-person meetups, like Oracle Beer Bern, or online events, like the ACEs@home or Tech Pub Quiz. But a full-size, in-person, conference was a new adventure for all of us.
Timing is key! When should it be?
The conference season in Europe is generally from March-April till December and is quite packed. It is not easy to find the ideal time for a new conference. Overlapping with another conference wouldn’t be a problem for attendees, but speakers will have to decide. And being speakers at many conferences ourselves, we didn’t want to generate any conflict. That’s how, after several internal discussions, we came up with the idea of the end of January.
The date was set, and the countdown started: we are now May 2023, tick, tock, tick, tock…
Location: more challenging than expected
We have a date, we need a place! The conference venue has two main challenges: location and price.
It should be easily accessible and well connected by public transport and also be located somewhere centrally based on the attendees. Luckily for us Switzerland is small and has a good public transport network, therefore the location can be (almost) anywhere between Zurich and Bern.
A very challenging aspect of a conference venue is the price: even before running your conference you will pay it, and if nobody comes, you are still paying it. We also discovered that asking for conference venues just 8 months in advance is already way too late: many places have to be booked 12+ months in advance.
We were lucky enough to be supported by Oracle Switzerland. They agreed to host the conference in their office at the Circle, in front of the airport, in Zurich.
Content: speakers and sessions
We now have a date and a location: what else is missing? Speakers, content! This part was the easiest one for us, because being speakers ourselves, we know how to run a call for papers and a selection. Also being in the ACE Program for some years, gave us a good network among other ACEs who often present at conferences and a good number of Oracle product managers.
We did run our call for papers for 5 weeks, till Sunday 22 October. We then applied a good dose of “Swiss efficiency”, reviewed all the submissions, and made our selection the day after.
Selected speakers were notified and a week later the agenda was published.
How to finance the conference?
At this point, we have a date, a location, and content: but what will the attendees and speakers eat and drink at the conference? We need to provide catering.
Being a new group and not having run any paid events, we started with no money. We did a quick budget of the forecasted costs for catering and some other expenses (printing badges for the attendees for example) and started working on how to finance it.
We did work with two local companies to sign a sponsoring deal with them, and the rest was going to be covered by the ticketing income. We were targeting a balanced budget, not focusing on making a profit, and knowing that if we were wrong, we would have to cover the costs from our own pockets.
Finally time for the conference!
It is finally the end of January 2024, and we, the speakers, and attendees are traveling to Zurich. One could imagine this is the easy part, everything is organized and therefore we can just be there and enjoy.
Wrong! During the conference we keep running around to make sure everything is ok, checking the coffee machine has coffee (lesson learned: Oracle conference attendees drink a LOT of coffee: we should ask a coffee brand to sponsor us next time), fixing the usual screens issues, checking there is enough food, clean up the used dishes and glasses after each break to keep the location clean, make sure everybody has what they needed.
We were all very pleased to be back home after the conference and finally have a full night of sleep!
All in all, it was great and we will do it again
It has been an incredible journey, from speakers to organizers in just a few months. The conference went well, and the feedback was very positive.
We want to thank Oracle Switzerland for providing the location and supporting us. Also, Callista and dbi services who sponsored a new conference: local companies must recognize the benefits of the community and agree to sponsor local initiatives, it generates a virtuous circle.
And also thank you to the ACE Program: through it, we meet speakers from all around Europe, and we managed to have them participate in our call for papers and join us for our first conference. Some of them, who are experienced conference organizers, shared with us good tips based on their experiences.
What’s next? Planning for the Database Circle Conference 2025 started the day after the 2024 event was over: when you think you are right in time, you are probably already late if you are organizing a conference.