In this post (which has been looong overdue :p ) I’ll show you how you could make use of Social Networking Sites to make knowledge sharing and meeting people more fun. As you can see from the illustration above, I’ve made use of the following sites/services to build a dynamic and multidimensional means of communication:
- FeedBurner RSS
- FeedBurner Mail Subscription
- Google Sites
The story behind it…
I am a DBA for 4years+, and started with zero knowledge about Oracle. I joined SQL*Wizard, which has a great training program and exposed me to a lot of difficult DBA situations. After a while I got my OCA and OCP then got interested on Linux and got my RHCT… well, hopefully RHCE soon. All of my accumulated knowledge came from three things. First: lots of reading/research Second: doing test cases….. Third:…..guess what….
it’s the community.
And speaking of community, we have our local users group here, called Philippine Oracle Users Group (POUG) which has been inactive for a long time (speaking based on my experience) I joined the POUG Yahoo Group last November 2007, ever since I joined there was no activity… then months have passed I was able to gain more knowledge and experience as a DBA, joined other forums, participated on online communities, mailing list, and even follow other Users Group activities. Then one day, I was checking on some of the Yahoo Groups that I’ve joined and a couple of mouse clicks brought me again to POUG Yahoo Group and noticed the last message was still year 2007…. yes I felt bad…. I think the community spirit among technology groups in the US or other countries seems to be stronger… I admire these guys, and I want to have one here, locally. It’s just difficult to motivate people to share ideas and help each other.
BTW the latest news about POUG… it is closing down as a corporation. There could be a number of reasons and one of them could be the inactive status. Whatever are the reasons for closing it, I am sure I’m not alone wanting to have a local community…
It got me thinking, why not do some social experiment? … If I could pool a number of Oracle Users (DBA/Developers), feed them updates about the latest in Oracle, give helpful articles, links, blogs, videos, or any technical info that would be useful on their everyday tasks will stir up the curiosity and I may find like minded people that could help me build (or revive) the local Users Group/community. Well, I’d like to have an environment similar to Oracle-L (http://www.freelists.org/list/oracle-l) or China’s ITPUB (http://www.itpub.net), where you can find lots of good stuff, good questions, good replies, no one is ranting about something (but this can’t be completely avoided), somebody is sharing of a problem then the other guy (expert or a newbie) shares his solution, nobody thinks of competition (company A vs. company B, or consultant A or B vs C)…
just pure technology…(but yes, preferably there should be real interaction)
All of these inspired me to create a Facebook page, and called it “Oracle Users – Philippines” (sorry I can’t think of a better name 
) … One service/site followed after the other (LinkedIn, Twitter, RSS Feed and Mail Subscription)…. and somehow I managed to create a useful link between them. But the primary objective for putting up these networking accounts is to have a pool of professionals & newbies sharing knowledge, experiences, and helping each other.
Since it was created last year (latter part of 2009), it has now grown to 300+ members! (and still increasing) you can see the demographics below:
And you can see the rate of page views over the period of October to March which is a proof that there are people reading the daily entries
So what’s happening?
Also, we’ve been using these networking accounts to spread the news about the periodic DBA round table, technical sessions, enablement and workshops. See a sample post from Shaheen (from Oracle Singapore) below. She’s on the same team as Blair Layton, and they’ve been doing good on putting up community programs here in the Philippines. Thanks for them for giving me the chance to present twice on the DBA round table.
Also, just recently the Upgrade Guys were here in Manila (see the blog post here) for a one day 11gR2 upgrade seminar. There were a lot of attendees! .. roughly around 70+.. composed of customers, partners, and even Oracle employees… and I was happy to meet new friends and see a comment like the one below after the event
….So even if I don’t frequently post on this blog, I microblog a lot of useful stuff on these networking sites
And I think connecting people within these networking sites is a good place to start…. so let’s see what happens next
