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Announcing the ORCLAPEX NOVA Meetup Group

Following in the footsteps of a few others, I’m happy to announce the formation and initial meeting of the ORCLAPEX NOVA (Northern Virginia) group!  

As Dan McGhan and Doug Gault have mentioned in their blogs, a bunch of us who are regular APEX users are trying to continue to grow the community by providing in-person meetings where we can meet other APEX developers and trade stories, tips and anything else.  Each of the groups is independently run by the local organizers, so the formats and topics will vary from group to group, but the core content will always be focused around Oracle APEX. Groups will also be vendor-neutral, meaning that the core purpose of the group is to provide education and facilitate the sharing of APEX-related ideas, not to market services of products.

Right now, there are a number of groups already formed across the world: 

I’m happy to announce that the first meeting of the ORCLAPEX NOVA group will be Thursday, May 29th, 2014 at Oracle’s Reston office in Reston, VA at 7:00 PM.  Details about the event can be found here.  We will start the group with a bang, as Mike Hichwa, VP of Database Development at Oracle, will be presenting APEX 5.0 New Features for the bulk of the meeting.  You can guarantee that we’ll get to see the latest and greatest features being prepared for the upcoming APEX 5.0 release.  Here’s the rest of the agenda:

 7:00 PM Pizza & Sodas; informal chats 

 7:15 PM Welcome - Scott Spendolini, Enkitec 

 7:30 PM APEX 5.0 - Mike Hichwa, Oracle Corporation 

 9:00 PM Wrap Up & Poll for Next MeetUp

IMPORTANT: In order to attend, you must create a MeetUp.com account, join the group and RSVP.  You will also have to use your real name, as it will be provided to Oracle Security prior to the event, and if you’re not listed, you may not be able to attend.  All communications and announcements will be facilitated via the MeetUp.com site as well.

Also, not all meetings need to be at the Oracle Reston facility; we’re using it because Mike & Shakeeb were able to secure the room for free, and it’s relatively central to Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun Counties.  Part of what we’ll have to figure out is how many smaller, more local groups we may want to form (i.e. PW County, DC, MD, etc.) and whether or not we should try to keep them loosely associated.  One thought that I had would be for the smaller groups to meet more locally and frequently, and for all of the groups to seek out presenters for an “all hands” type meeting that we can move around the region.  All options are on the table at this point.

I look forward to meeting many of you in person on the 29th!

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