My first Oracle Scene planning meeting

I had my first meeting, as a deputy editor, with the Oracle Scene team on Tuesday 12th July. The meeting was organised by Suzanne Gaunt, who is leaving the UKOUG on Friday. She will be sadly missed. Lavinia and Karina are taking over the role of producing the magazine.

Also at the meeting was Neil Jarvis, the editor, and Gillian and Philip Adams from www.doggARTadams.com, who look after the whole production of the magazine.

The main topic of discussion was the production process for the magazine and an outline of the timelines involved.

There was some discussions on how to improve the magazine with new material. Some of the suggestions included

• From the editors section to be added back in. This is a half page from each of the deputy editors. For myself this will be an introduction/bio in the next edition
• Ask the editors section, where the readers can submit questions to the editorial team for them to attempt to answer and hopefully in a humorous way
• Articles from the different regions and SIGs. This is to allow the user group to get to know what the other parts of the group are up to
• A Blog summary. This will be a round up of some of the blogs from user group community
• Introduce a competition in each edition
• Unusual Photo competitions
• Book reviews, which maybe Book giveaways from the publishers

In addition to these suggestions the main content of articles from the user community. Everyone is invited to write an article. It does not matter how long or short it is. The main idea is for you to share some of your knowledge. An article can be of any length, for example it could be 1/4 page, 1/2 page, 1, 2, 3 or 5 pages.

Have you come across a new or unusual feature, did you do something interesting with a feature, how and why you implemented it, case studies, new tools, etc.

So articles could be technical or non-technical, or on anything that might be of interest to the user community.

The next deadline for submitting articles is 26th August and with all deadlines it is good to submit early!

The finished magazine will be ready for distribution around the end of October.

If you have any suggestions of changes, additions, articles or adverting, let me know.