OTN Latin America (North) Tour 2014

For a few years now I (and I'm sure you have too) have heard about and followed the various Oracle User Group tours that OTN arranges/facilitates. A tour consists of a number of Oracle User Groups in a region coordinating together to have their conferences organised so that they can get speakers from across the world to come and present.

For most presenters it involves lots of travel. So instead of them doing all that travelling to present at one conference, they can now extend their travels a little and present in a number of countries. Most of the speakers are Oracle ACE Directors and OTN is very generous with their support in that they pay for all the flights, transportation and hotels. Without the generous support of OTN these tours and perhaps many of the conference would not take place.

With envy I used to follow the various speakers on tweeter as they talked about their travels from country to country and their experiences of meeting the people and exploring the various countries. Yes their time in each country seemed to be limited but they always got to see and do so much.

Earlier this year there was an call for presentations for the various OTN Tours in 2014. I submitted 3 presentations that coverd Oracle Advanced Analytics Option (Oracle Data Mining and Oracle R Enterprise). I thought I didn't stand a chance given the speakers that have participated in previous years.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email saying that I had been accepted onto the OTN Latin America (North) Tour. So you can imagine my excitement. The full OTN Tour North leg covers a number of countries across central and south America and is over a 2 week period. Unfortunately I'm not able to be away for that long, so I was accepted for the conferences on the first week of the tour. This will include Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico :-)

Some of you might think this is a bit of a golly and a holiday. What I've discovered over the past week or more is that it will be far from that. There is a lot of work in preparing the presentations, giving the presentation, setting up live demos between presentation, various meetings with people at the conferences etc etc etc. Then there is all the travel, all the airports, all the airport transfers, all the overnights in hotels. Over the course of 7 days I will be staying 6 different hotels.

I have spent the last week just trying to arrange my flights and hotels. This also involved trying to coordinate with other speakers so that we can travel together as much as possible.

Here are the dates and the presentations that I will be giving at these conferences:

4th August : Panama (in Panama City)

     10:00-11:00 : Getting Started with Oracle Data Miner & Predictive Analytics

     11:00-12:00 : Combining the Power of R and in-Datbaase Data Mining. Running R in the Database. Seriously!

     13:00-13:40 : Sentiment Analysis Using Oracle Data Mining

6th August : Costa Rica (in San Carlos)

     10:00-11:00 : Getting Started with Oracle Data Miner & Predictive Analytics

     13:00-14:00 : Sentiment Analysis Using Oracle Data Mining

     16:00-17:00 : Combining the Power of R and in-Datbaase Data Mining. Running R in the Database. Seriously!

8th August : Mexico (in Mexico City)

     14:00-15:00 : Getting Started with Oracle Data Miner & Predictive Analytics

     15:00-16:00 : Combining the Power of R and in-Datbaase Data Mining. Running R in the Database. Seriously!

When the agenda for the conferences are available I will have another blog post with their details.

If you are at one of these conference do please say hello :-)

I've finally booked all my flights and hotels. Many thanks to my fellow ACE Director presenters for your research and sharing of travel plans. It looks like there will be a groups of us all travelling together.

Now the next challenge is to prepare the presentations and live demos (yes live demos).

I hope to blog about each of the conferences and my travels to/from each country. It really depends on what time I will have and access to the internet. Perhaps this is something I will try to do on my various plane flights or waiting at the airports. So watch out for these :-)

Updated with some stats on my travels

My travel plans for the OTN Latin America tour of user group conferences involves

• 12,200 flying miles,
• 29.75 of flying time,
• way too many hours hanging around in airports
• over 8 days
• staying in 6 hotels
• plus 1 over night flight,
• giving 8 hours of presentations in 3 countries

Why do we do this? Because we love sharing with the Oracle User Groups around the world. I'm only doing 1 week of the tour. Some people are doing 2 weeks :-(