Thank you for volunteering to participate as a speaker at a meeting of the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group. We appreciate your willingness to help us promote DB2 education and to advance the progress of the relational technology field. Our users, vendors, consultants, and IBM representatives are collectively shaping the future of this industry by sharing their insights, experience, and expertise.

These guidelines have been prepared to assist speakers in preparing effective, thought-provoking presentations that comply with the primary objective of the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users’ Group: to provide vendor-agnostic education around DB2 tools and the core database. The topics we are interested in can range from application development to performance and tuning. Examples, particularly actual success stories and best practices from user members, are always popular with the group.

Background and logistics:

The Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group meets four times each year, typically on the second Wednesday in March, June, September and December. All meetings are held at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbia , Maryland. Meetings start at 9:00am and finish at 3:30pm.

Individual sessions are scheduled throughout the day, typically following the schedule below:

• 8:30 – 9:00 - Registration

• 9:00 – 10:15 - Session 1

• 10:15 – 10:30 -Break

• 10:30 – 11:45 -Session 2

• 11:45 - 12:45 -Sit down lunch

• 12:45 – 2:00 -Session 3

• 2:00 – 2:15 -Break

• 2:15 – 3:30 -Session 4

If your presentation requires more than one session (one hour and fifteen minutes) to deliver, please let your BWDB2UG board liaison know so that we can be sure the schedule reflects sufficient time. As with many RUGs, our members look forward to their meeting days and it is all too easy – and typical - for the group to become involved with a speaker and topic and fall behind. We try to avoid it!

What we need from you:

In order to notify our members and invite other members of the DB2 community, we ask that you provide us with the following information on you and your presentation as far in advance as possible. We try to mail invitations to our members at least two months in advance of the meeting and will publish your session information on our website within a day or two of receipt. Please help us spread the word. Specifically we need:

• Bio – a brief bio on you and your career with DB2. A paragraph or two is fine.
  
  
• Presentation abstract(s) – please send a brief overview of the presentation(s) you will deliver. Please keep the abstract relatively short (a paragraph or two).

Presentation Guidelines:

• Our sessions are intended to provide education around DB2 topics; they are not intended as sales presentations. Therefore we ask that if you represent a specific vendor’s solution, please limit your presentation focus to the database concept that your solution addresses. You may spend five minutes at the beginning of your presentation introducing yourself and your company, but then please remove all product names from your presentation and focus on concepts.
  
  
• If you would like to bring copies of your presentation with you when you present, that’s great. If not, please send your presentation at least two weeks in advance so that we can give our members time to print a copy to bring to the session(s).

Questions:

If you have any questions, please ask. The quickest way to reach the BWDB2UG board is via the board email address.

Thank you again for offering your time and talent to our group.