UKOUG, Oaktable and Blogging Confidentiality
September 25th, 2005 by Mark Rittman
Now that I’m back from Open World it’s time to start doing all the work to
prepare for the UKOUG Conference at
the end of October. I’m doing a presentation on
Oracle
10gR2 OLAP and Discoverer, plus there’s all the company presentations and
demos to put together, so there’s quite a lot of demo building and paper writing
to do over the next few weeks. I’ll also be organising a blogger dinner on the
Monday night for after the UKOUG Focus Pubs for which I’ll post up details
shortly.
I’ve signed up for the
Oaktable day
on the Sunday before the conference (no Doug, I had to pay for it ;-)) and with
a bit of luck I’ll be able to go along for the social event afterwards, although
I’ll need to fit it all in with the SIG Chairs’ meeting and the UKOUG drinks as
well. Should be an interesting and busy few days.
I made a conscious decision for Open World to stick to the BI&W
presentations, as technically speaking that’s what my job is about and Open
World is where you get to hear new product announcements (often verbal, not
necessarily included on the slides) and meet the product managers; the UKOUG
Conference is much more about the users, third-party consultancies and
independents and (in my opinion at least) is more concerned with technical
content than marketing. Certainly I’ll be going along to more of the server
tech. presentations than I went to at OOW, hopefully get to catch up with a few
people and pick up a few tips and techniques. Looking at the agenda, a few that
I’m particularly looking forward to are Gary Goodman’s
"The
Performance Dangers of Database Independent Applications",
"All About
Binding" by Tom Kyte,
"Hints and
How To Use Them" by Jonathan Lewis,
"Performance Data Mining using ADDM & AWR" by Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha and
Mogens N rgaard’s
"Performance from a Different Perspective"
Talking about the Sunday before the conference, Oracle are running an
in-depth tutorial for XML Publisher that day as well; I saw the product (and the
level of interest) whilst over at Open World and I’d recommend that anyone who’s
thinking of deploying this product goes up a day early and takes part in the
session. Details of the event are
here and
it’s open to all full conference delegates.
Finally, and changing the subject a little bit, one thing I noticed whilst
over at Open World was that whilst a lot of people now knew me through the blog,
often half-way through the conversation they’d say something like "You’re not
going to blog this, are you?" sometimes jokingly, but often seriously. It sort
of shows that writing a blog can be a double-edged sword; people know of you,
but it would be a shame if all they thought you could do was write a blog (i.e.
you’re not a technical person yourself). More seriously though, I guess people
worry that something they might tell you in confidence will end up getting
splashed on your homepage tomorrow as a bit of exclusive news.
All I can say to this – and I would imagine this would be the position of all
the Oracle bloggers – is that there’s a clear distinction between what’s said to
you in confidence and what goes into the blog; basically, if you know what’s
being said to you is not for public consumption, you keep it to yourself, in the
same way that if you’re told something which is obviously confidential you don’t
then go and tell everyone else that you know. Of course in the end you end up in
a situation where you restrict those things that you say in the blog, but that’s
the same as in life in general and if in the end people don’t feel they can
trust you, you’ll soon find that you’re out of the loop anyway – this much
obviously be doubly true for those of us who work for Oracle. What it does mean
though, even if you end up keeping most things to yourself, is that at least
when you pass comment on things or come up with predictions, at least you’re
doing it based on a better understanding of the true situation, both as Oracle
would want you to see it and how others see it as well. I know that even from my
trip over to SF last week I’ve got a much better understanding of where Oracle
are going with Fusion and in particular BI&W, and whilst I probably can’t
comment on it directly, I’m pretty sure of what’s going on now and what’s likely
(and not) to work, and I can make sure I channel my efforts accordingly.
Any comments from other bloggers?
September 25th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
I thought the last part was interesting enough to write about actually. Something I don’t struggle with but wanted to make clear what my opinion on the topic was… http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/09/off-record.html
September 25th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
I tell quite a lot in my blog, even some personal stuff.
But I try to write a little bit decently and I am not giving too much -private- details which could be embarassing for someone else.
About publishing some hints or relating some event, I am doing this freely, it expresses my opinion, my feelings, that is what blogs are good for.
September 25th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
Hi Mark,
Glad you’re back with us and thanks for the Openworld updates.
On the blogging confidentially issue, I can’t see myself writing a blog entry talking about what someone had said to me unless :-
a) They said I could (because I would normally ask them). e.g. I had a dialogue with the IOUG Select editors over some comments I made in Tom Kyte’s blog. I would rather have made that debate public, but I asked them first and they preferred that I didn’t. (Actually, thinking back to this example, perhaps I shouldn’t have made the comment in the first place, but we’re all learning all the time, right?)
b) They were not identifiable and the meaning of what they were saying was more important. e.g. ‘I was speaking to someone the other day who insists that we should test on production when neccessary’.
c) It was my personal opinion on what someone had said online, which I feel is open to comment. Even then, I would normally point out to them that I had done so, so they have a reasonable right to reply. That’s what I did with http://tinyurl.com/9f43n and received a couple of replies, which I followed up on.
But, whilst I don’t go with Don Burleson’s comments on legality and the like (maybe I live in a less litigous environment or I’m just motivated by different things) I do think he’s right in identifying bloggers as journalists. I suspect journalists, through training and discussion, have clearer ideas on what’s acceptable or not?
But I wouldn’t want to disappear up my own posterior here. I think most folk would recognise what is and isn’t suitable material for commentary.
Good point, though, and well worth the debate.
See you in Birmingham (and I promise your secret comments are safe with me ;-) )
Cheers,
Doug
September 25th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
An interesting variation on this is writing about issues you come across when working with clients. I’ve posted a couple of articles like this (http://www.rittman.net/archives/001325.html and http://www.rittman.net/archives/001140.html are good examples) where I’ve come across and issue that I felt was worth sharing with a wider audience. Now I’ve always been very careful to not name the customer or the sector they’re in (often to the point of changing their details to “blur the trail”) and I’ve tried to leave a few weeks since I was there before I post; in all cases, table names, type of data and so on are all changed.
Now in both those instances I didn’t specifically ask the client whether I could post the article, but as I blurred the details and made sure that there was nothing embarrassing that I printed, I thought this would be OK. I did however get concerned when I noticed one of the client’s staff had posted a follow-up on one of the articles, although as it agreed with the article’s point I took this as being OK.
Now, I guess by the “letter of the law” I was in the clear as the client couldn’t be identified from the example, and there was nothing uncomplimentary in it, but of course a future client could take it differently and other potential clients could be put off from using me at all if they thought all of their “mistakes” were fair game for articles on the blog. Therefore, I think Tom’s approach, “everything is off the record unless I ask otherwise, and you give permission” is both the clearest and safest, and certainly stating this upfront (most of my clients know of the blog, in fact many have come about because of it) is probably the best way to go about things, certainly keeps things on the level and everyone happy.
September 26th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
As the supposedly anonymous author of a blog (I say “supposedly” because nothing is truly anonymous), I (hopefully) have a special sensitivity to what should and should not be published. Not that I received any super secret information from Oracle or other companies during Oracle OpenWorld (Larry Ellison didn’t inform me of his next purchase target).
I did run into an interesting situation last week. Before Oracle OpenWorld began, I received a piece of information which is embargoed until a particular date. During one of the presentations at Oracle OpenWorld, this information was publicly announced. Afterwards I went to the presenter and asked, “Isn’t this supposed to still be under wraps?” No harm done, though.