NY Web Guy

Note: this is part of the series of posts about Microsoft Community Ecosystem. Previous posts – Introduction, Part 1 – Microsoft Partner Community. I am participating in a panel discussing these programs and what Open Source companies can learn from Microsoft this week at Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. The panel is on Tuesday, March 25^th, 2008 at 2pm and is called “What Open Source Can Learn From Microsoft and the Proprietary World”.

Microsoft makes software for so many different areas, it has many constituencies that are part of their community. There are developers – they care about development tools and new frameworks. In addition, there are database gurus, administrators of their various products, office users, enterprise users, etc. There are many demographics that apply, and obviously it is good to have them all as part of an ecosystem. I am most familiar with the developer community, but will try to cover other efforts as well. This post will introduce the community-run programs, and then examine the different programs and support structures that exist to help the community.

Community Programs

User Groups

These are pretty traditional user groups, just like other companies and technologies have. They meet about once a month and discuss topics of interest to that particular groups. There are several programs out there to reinforce them, about which I’ll talk below. To give you an idea of the different areas covered, here are the active groups in New York City:

• DotNET User Group
• Connected Systems Group
• Enterprise Windows Group
• SharePoint User Group
• SQL Server Group
• .NET Meetup (started recently by a company Lab49).

These groups are community-run in that their leaders (for the most part) are not associated with Microsoft in an official capacity. Microsoft does help out by providing space (and sometimes food). They also form a great basis for other community-run events, such as Code Camps (next section).

This is in NYC alone – there are similar groups in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and others. For information about their meetings, check out Peter Laudati’s blog, where he does a great job aggregating all the meetings on one page.

Code Camps

Code Camp is a free community-run, (usually) one-day event. It’s basically a mini-conference. Here is the original “Code Camp Manifesto”. The focus is on sharing knowledge and showing code. It usually happens on weekends, most often Saturdays. Here is the schedule of code camps.

Because Code Camps are held on a weekend, people are less tired, and Code Camps are usually well attended. There are usually several tracks, and each talk lasts an hour, to a maximum of an hour and fifteen minutes at some camps. They attract up to several hundred attendees. What is so nice about these is that it’s a great way to catch up on some latest technologies, and learn about things and branch out your knowledge.

The people who run these are usually user group leaders. Microsoft tries to help out, sometimes with sponsorship money for food, sometimes by donating the space, but this is mostly a community-run event. I haven’t been involved in planning these, but they looks like fairly easy to plan compared to a full conference. If you can get somebody to donate the space, you can use the local user groups as a base for speakers, as well as invite speakers from communities nearby. Because they are community run, it’s relatively easy to get a speaking slot. However, the quality of sessions is quite high. Code camp in New York a few years ago was the first time I started doing public speaking outside of internal presentations at different companies I worked at.

I really enjoy Code Camps. They are nice to learn about things, to interact, to network. You get to see five or six presentations, so even if one or two is not great, it’s still pretty good signal to noise ratio. Also, they are local (although you can always travel to go to ones outside your area), so you don’t have to spend half a day getting there and back.

For a learning-addict like me, Code Camps are a great way to feed the habit…

Resources To Foster Community

User Groups and Code Camps are great community programs. Even though they are run by community, there are a few programs and structures that exist to reinforce them.

Microsoft-Employed Developer Evangelists

I didn’t mention Microsoft employees responsible for partnership because it’s pretty obvious that they exist. What is not obvious is that Microsoft has a title called Developer Evangelist. The job of these people is to encourage and foster Microsoft community, usually in a specific geographic region. Their geographic region can be quite large, with two evangelists covering the NY Metropolitan area, for example – NY, NJ, and CT.

The goal is to evangelize Microsoft technologies and increase adoption of .NET technologies. I believe the best ones view themselves as community’s voice inside Microsoft. I don’t know all they do, but I know they are a great resource to the community groups. In addition to supporting local user groups, they try to reach out to non-Microsoft communities, conduct online seminars for people who don’t like to go to the meetings, work with companies to increase adoption of Microsoft technologies and training, and many other things. Additionally, they have great contacts within the community, and can be counted on to give talks in a pinch.

Developer Evangelists have a tough job – to make it easier for the community to work with Microsoft. Additionally, they work to attract people from outside of Microsoft community, such as people doing Java, PHP. At a minimum, Microsoft would like to make sure they are not very unhappy with Microsoft, maybe just a bit unhappy J.

INETA

Another organization that supports the Microsoft community efforts is INETA – International .NET Association. It’s an organization that serves as an umbrella and a resource for user groups. According to the website, INETA serves 255 user groups.

The INETA Speaker program has a list of speakers, and they make INETA speakers available to user groups. It’s a somewhat exclusive group – to become INETA speaker is not easy. The nice thing about it is that the INETA speakers are good. As a user group you can request an INETA speaker and know that you will get somebody of high quality.

I know that with other user groups and conferences, the quality can vary – this is one way Microsoft user groups make sure the user groups have good quality content. I am not sure if there are member dues for INETA or if it’s a Microsoft-sponsored organization, but I do know it’s a positive force that provides lots of resources to the communities.

The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program

The MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program is probably my favorite program, since I think it’s quite brilliant. Within each product group, a certain number of community members get recognized as MVPs. These are the guys judged to be great at helping increase the community around Microsoft technologies.

What this amounts to is many people who don’t work for Microsoft spending a big chunk of their time evangelizing Microsoft, answering questions, and in other ways promoting Microsoft technologies. In exchange, they get some support from Microsoft, but my guess is that the MVP program costs a fraction of the value it generates for Microsoft. Many MVPs are independent consultants who can use their MVP status as imprimatur for their billable work. Others work for companies. It’s a very symbiotic program – both the MVPs and Microsoft benefit from the relationship tremendously.

One thing to realize is that this is a community program first – it rewards people who are active. This means that while MVPs are usually technically strong, MVP status itself does not really mean that this person is an expert in a technology, just that they are very vocal about helping people in this technology. It’s hard to have one without the other, but it’s possible.

Here is some more information from an article What is an MVP, Anyways:

MVP program is an “award and recognition program.” While a certain amount of technical skill is usually needed to accomplish the tenets of MVP membership, the MVP program is in no way a measuring stick of the technical merits of its members.

The key take-away here is that the MVP program is now agnostic as to the venue (online or offline) that you use to make your community contributions. The result should be a greater amount of diversification in the program’s membership, and, in some respects, it has worked.

The MVP program is designed for people who would make the same community contributions even if the program didn’t exist.

For instance, there are now over 3,100 MVPs in 75 countries worldwide, covering more than 75 technologies in nine languages.

MVPs are great people to reinforce other programs. They generate a lot of knowledge and help through their blogs, and are frequent speakers at community events and conferences. Since they are typically practitioners, they have a unique view of what customers need and how they are actually using the technologies, and some serve as advisors to product managers and Microsoft teams.

How do you become an MVP? It’s an award and recognition program for being active in the community. It started out as a way to reward people active in the online forums. It evolved to now involve speakers, prolific bloggers, writers, and others. There are many ways to become an MVP, and currently there are thousands of MVPs in topics ranging from Outlook to C# to SharePoint. As part of the reward, MVP get MSDN subscription, and are invited to a special annual conference for MVPs, where they get access to the product teams and see what is coming down the line from the company. There are people at Microsoft managing the program, and MVPs can contact them as necessary to get more support from Microsoft as needed.

Regional Director Program

To be honest, this is the program I know the least about. Each region has a person who is a Regional Director (RD), whose role is also to encourage community. There are less than 150 Regional Directors worldwide - you can find yours here. While not employed by Microsoft, I believe they do get some kind of compensation and have certain commitments to Microsoft.

Jonathan Goodyear, one of RDs, writes about the program:

“ RDs are not employed by Microsoft. In fact, we are not compensated for our role as RDs (that’s not completely true … more on that in a bit). The role of an RD is to act as an unbiased third-party evangelist of Microsoft products and services and to work with software developers to ensure successful project engagements. We act as the glue between Microsoft and the developer community”

That same article talks about the difference between Developer Evangelists (DEs) and RDs.

“An important distinction between RDs and DEs is that DEs can be influenced to ride the party line. RDs, on the other hand, can (and often do) voice strong opinions in opposition to things Microsoft is doing that the RDs feel don’t fall in line with the interests of Microsoft developers, end users, and customers. RDs have many media contacts, so their voices are heard loud and clear. In this way, RDs act as a strong advocate for the Microsoft community. “

So in a way, they are representatives of Microsoft who don’t work for Microsoft, and thus has some independence.

Other Programs

In addition to the larger programs above, here are some of the other efforts that I learned about:

• Architecture Day – half a day program for in-depth discussion of technologies.
• Microsoft’s Student Partners program – a program to reach out to Universities – finds students who serve as advocates at educational institutions.
• Installfests – I haven’t been to these, but recently there have been some gatherings around Visual Studio 2008.

Conclusion

One of the best things about the Microsoft Community is that it’s very easy to participate. I was a pretty unknown commodity when I started. Because Code Camps are community-run events, anybody can easily submit a talk topic, and get accepted. As you can see, with dozens of years of fostering it, Microsoft’s community is vibrant and strong. I believe it is one of the company’s biggest assets to remain relevant and increase its reach.

Note: I plan to continue this series by talking about online resources that Microsoft provides, and then will conclude with some suggestions for the Open Source companies on what they can learn from Microsoft’s efforts.

Tags: Microsoft, Community, MVP Program, Code Camp