The end of OUGN 2016 is coming and I decided to give you my impression about this event as it is the first time I attend it.
First of all: it’s on a boat ! Isn’t that exotic and cool enough to be a reason to attend at least once?
There is a major issue and a major advantage related to that… The issue is that internet connection is fairly instable and when you have 400+ devices connected it’s really not easy to get some bandwidth, so if you thought it was a good idea to put your presentation on Dropbox it would be better to disable sync as it will take ages.
The big advantage of the boat is that people are all there. Not like in other events where they can disperse in all the directions, soon or late you walk into everybody here. This is also valid for the last evening: in other events everybody disappear after the closing session, at OUGN you must wait the day after to be back in Oslo to leave the boat, so the most logical decision is to attend the party.
From a content point of view it’s really rich: there were something like 300 and more attendees and multiple tracks from DB to DevOps, from BI to Apps etc. (you can find a list of the session in the official schedule: guidebook.com/g/ougn16). There are many rooms and so you can choose between one of the 5-6 parallel sessions all the time.
As a foreign it’s true that the number of sessions in English is lower than in Norwegian and the worst is that sometime you can be mistaken by a written description in English to end up watching pictures with some Norwegian voices in the background (if you tell the speaker you don’t understand Norwegian they are more than happy to switch or at least mix languages). Being the Oracle user group of Norway event it makes sense, and the foreign speakers are really good, so you always end up with an option of which session to attend.
The OUGN team did a great job and everything is very well organized (including the speakers’ dinner on the Wednesday evening: a great chance to have really interesting chats with other speakers and often people you already know as crossed at other events in the past).
All in all it was really good and I will definitely think about attending again next year if possible.
OUGN16 closing event: Las Vegas? No idea what it is, the OUGN boat is where the party is …