A number of months ago I wrote a story on how Mike Riley reached out to myself and a few others to head-up ODTUG’s new Community initiative for the BI space. In that story, I talked about meet ups being one of the core areas of focus in 2015, but more specifically meetups that generate a sense of fun and comraderie.
With that in mind, I’m happy to write about our first upcoming meet up on Sept 4th in the Twin Cities at Brit’s Pub, an iconic venue in Minneapolis on the famous Nicollet Mall. Most good cities have some nice street which is a bit more walkable for pedestrians and is lined with great shops, bars, and restaurants. For Minneapolis, Nicollet Mall is that street.
But there are so many great restaurants and bars on Nicollet Mall, how did we narrow it down and why pick a British pub when there is a perfectly good Irish pub on Nicollet Mall as well (after all, my last name is ‘McGinley’)? Actually, it wasn’t a hard decision at all, because we wanted fun and comraderie at our BI meet ups and Brit’s offers something cool that no other location on Nicollet Mall offers: roof-top lawn bowling.
Lawn Bowling is a pretty easy game to play. If you’ve ever played Bocce Ball, it’s similar, if not the same depending on your rules. It’s also a little similar to shuffleboard. There are two teams and each team gets a set of softball-sized balls. There is a smaller ball, often called a ‘jack’ which gets tossed somewhere on the court by one of the teams. Each team then takes turn rolling their balls to get them as close to the jack as possible without touching it. In Bocce Ball you are allowed to “underhand toss” your balls as well, but at Brit’s, they strictly forbid this — you can only roll. After each team has bowled their set of balls, you tally the score based on the closeness to the jack, then you switch sides and the other team gets to throw the jack back toward the direction you just threw from. You play until you reach a certain score or until you run out of court time, if you prefer.
If you live in the Twin Cities area, are interested in meeting more Oracle BI users/professionals like yourself, and love a fun night of FREE snacks, drinks, city skyline views, and competitive fun, then this is the BI meet up for you! Head over to the registration page and sign-up (did I mention it’s free????)! We’ll be there from 6–9pm on Sept 4 having a good time. Tweet at me (@kevin_mcginley) and ODTUG (@ODTUG) hashtag #BImeetup after you register so we know you’re coming!
