Worthy of Membership
Oracle Technology Network redefines what it means
to be a member of the club.
Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will
accept people like me as a member.” 1
Replace club with community, and you have
an interesting basis for discussion.
There are various competing theories
of community out there, ranging from the
passive to the active. (In the context of this
discussion, a community is either partially
or completely virtual—hence geographically
neutral—in nature. Once upon a time, nearly
all communities were built on the premise
of shared geography.) On the passive end of
the spectrum lies the community of interest,
in which any people with a shared interest
are implicitly members—Chicago Bears fans,
for example. On the active end, where the
open source world lives, it’s been said that
community membership is defined only
by contributions (of code, money, and/or
time). And in the middle, at the top of the
bell curve, is the virtual community, where
according to Howard Rheingold in his book
The Virtual Community (The MIT Press,
2000), “people carry on public discussions
long enough, with sufficient human feeling,
to form webs of personal relationships.”
Since its inception, the Oracle Technology
Network (OTN) program has tilted
toward the passive end of this spectrum.
Historically, the bonds of shared interest—
as expressed by ticking a checkbox in one’s
oracle.com account preferences—have
been sufficient for helping the OTN team
define what a community member is. But
this action of self-identifying as an Oracle
Technology Network member had the unde-
sirable side effect of dividing the community
between the active and the passive, because
a community of interest does not neces-
sarily imply that all its members are actively
participating and engaged—even if they
consider themselves part of the community.
And for the health of the program, counting
Oracle Technology Network Turbocharges Oracle Open World
If you’re an Oracle Open World attendee this year, prepare yourself for the usual excitement
infusion from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) program. Highlights include
•;Numerous technical sessions led by Oracle ACEs
•;The massive OTN Night party on Monday night (check the conference agenda for location)
•;Morning coffee/afternoon beer; daily raffles; community meetups; live tech chats; and free
software, T-shirts, and other swag at the OTN Lounge (check agenda for location)
Please stop by these sessions, events, and the OTN Lounge, and see the team!
Oracle;Open World;Registration
oracle.com/openworld
active members is important—for reasons I
will describe in a moment.
I implore you to participate, because the
O TN team truly needs to know more about
you before we can create and prioritize new
objectives for the program. If you have not
received the invitation, you’ll find it at oracle
.com/technetwork/goto/survey.
By the way, the team could have gone
another direction: requiring self-identification
as a gateway to benefits. But this would have
added an unnecessary layer of complexity
and raised the bar for membership overall.
Groucho would not have approved.
Justin Kestelyn
( justin.kestelyn@oracle
.com) is senior director,
Oracle Technology
Network and developer
programs, as well as
Oracle Technology Network editor in chief.
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