Archive for the ‘community’ Category
Microsoft Technology Developers constitute one of the largest technical communities in the world. A significant number of these communities are hosted by external parties other than Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft itself hosts a number of these communities.
Recently, I was invited to deliver a session on community tools that Microsoft developers can benefit from at Delhi User Group. I took sometime looking up these communities and was astounded by the sheer numbers of these Microsoft hosted communities. While I made all efforts to include the ones i could find, I am sure that i may have left quite a bit of them as well. If you know of something that i may have left, please leave a comment here for everyone’s benefit.
I haven’t covered the 3rd party communities in the presentation below. Also, the most obvious resource for technical info on MS technologies – MSDN & Technet have been left out.
If you are someone working with Microsoft technologies, spend a minute looking at these technology communities from Microsoft and i am sure that you would leave with some links u were not aware of.
Remember the success of the community depends on the people who actively contribute.. looking forward to ur mark in the community!
“Microsoft community drives Microsoft products” – a statement that would make you roll with laughter, isn’t it? it did for me too till i attended the User Group Leads meet organised by Microsoft. it is here that i witnessed the seriousness with which the user group community goes about its job (i had earlier tweeted about this).
User Groups is the life blood of the Microsoft communities (other community avenues include blogs, forums, webcasts and events) in India… there are more than 40,000 known users spread across India in numerous professional user groups in various cities (there are another equal nos. in student user groups)… the bangalore user group can alone boast of more than 10,000 users (truly amazing).. with more than 71 user group sessions in the last year alone, u can’t be far away from one happening in any large city of the country.
The user group leads were a very attentive and enthusiastic bunch who met the MS folks with great deal of passion and feedback. the commitment from MS folks was more than evident with around 10 MS employees present to engage with the community leaders. Not only were the user group leads eager to provide feedback, they also spent significant time exchanging notes and sharing their vision of the user groups with each other.
The focus wasn’t only on the established user groups like in Mumbai but also on the emerging ones e.g. in Jaipur. the most exciting moment was the User Group award time:
the BEST Developer User Group for the country was found to be the Bangalore User Group. the BEST Networking Professionals User Group was the Bangalore IT Pro User Group. Amongst the new or emerging user groups in the country, Chennai .NET User Group was adjusted as the best and Hyderabad Techies was the choice in the IT Pro UG section.
If you want to enhance/ share your knowledge with the community, head over to http://www.microsoft.com/india/communities/usergroups/default.aspx to find the user group in your city and join the same. Joining any MS User Group anywhere in the country is absolutely FREE. The quality of speakers in the user groups is surprisingly high with most being MVPs, Microsoft Employees and other reputed speakers.
If you know of an active MS community that is not mentioned in the list above, please leave a comment here and I will take the responsibility of getting it listed
Microsoft has been running newsgroups and forums to provide community support for its products.. incidentally, many MVPs come from forums where they are TOP contributors to the forums..
but this isn’t about MVPs today 🙂
i
t is about MS forums… to begin with Microsoft used Community Server from Telligent to host its forums. And now they are revamping the same on to its own code.. in the background, there seems to be an entire Community Platform emerging with blogs, tags, forums & wikis within Microsoft.. (very much in line with MSs focus on community)..
The new forums are available at:
http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/
http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/
http://forums.community.microsoft.com/
However, the older forums are also around and the migration will be done in a phased manner. there are plenty of exciting features in this release:
· Dynamic Posting, Quoting and Paging: Now posting, quoting posts and paging in a thread are now all client site events. Users can post replies or quotes to thread without having to wait for the server to reload the page. These features makes the application snappy, dynamic and friendly.
· Inline Posting: New posting of questions or replies keeps you on the same page which you can still scroll and see the contents of as well as page through the threads or posts while creating your message. This allows you to “Multi-Quote” when replying to a thread. This makes it easy to respond to several posts in a single post.
· Thread Preview: This allows users to view the first 20 posts of a thread in line without needing to commit to a post back or page navigation. Users can preview threads and then decide to dive in and participate.
· Real Time Updates: Every page updates with new activity. Home pages update to show changes in recently online users, forum pages continually update to show recently updated threads and new posts pop up dynamically to users viewing threads.
· Code Formatting and Spellchecking: Users have the ability to include code and format it to the specific code language. C++ users want their code to look like C++ code. People adding XML want it to look like XML. This is now possible with the latest editor. Users can also spell check their posts if they so choose.
· Proposed Answers: Any user can now more actively participate in helping other users by selecting “Proposed Answer” in any question thread. This should help others that have the true authority to validate the answers, Moderators and Question Askers, find questions that may be very close to being resolved.
Community Features
· Online Avatars
· Recently Online
· Filtering By Users: Users can scope down the list of contributors to a particular thread by simply selecting the user filter bar. This is especially useful for users who know “who” they are looking for and want to see contributions from trusted sources.
· User Recognition and Affiliation: A medals recognition system rewards users for their participation. This can help users understand whether the source of a post is from a novice or someone who has invested a lot more time and effort in continual online forums participation.
· User Based Tagging: Users can apply tags to threads which help other users find content the community find relevant to a particular term. Users can select multiple tags, every one, applying a more targeted query to refine the pool of threads.
· Browse Users: Simply browse the user list and review any user’s recognition status or last participation date and clicking “view threads”.
Discoverability Enhancements
· Enhanced Filters: A powerful set of additional filter options allow for finding threads of various types, states and properties. e.g. a moderator can look for people that have posted questions with no replies that include code snippets.. Better yet, these filters can also be subscribed to as RSS!
· Tag Browsing: Users at any level of the forums application (brand, forum or thread) can find threads by tag.
· Top Level Filter Entry Points: Users that always like to start off at the top level of the forums list can now quick link into the unanswered or answered threads in the forum of their choice. This saves what used to be three or more clicks, anchoring the user into a context pre set for them.
· Search Result Filters: When search results come back and seem overwhelming users can select a filter for various thread states and properties. Users can choose to select only answers, only questions or any of these threads that may contain code.
the base to a successful community is the community platform it uses.. with this release, MS has reaffirmed its commitment to the community!
What remains to be seen in such a high usage site is how well will the site be able to run without any hiccups? MS has a lot of experience running high traffic sites and this should be also run smoothly.. but u can never be sure of 1-2 bugs lurking in the vast expanse of code :)..
IMHO, Microsoft should also think about releasing these community platforms for the community so that community software on .NET technologies become more widespread!
Delhi Bloggers group is an aggregation of people who blog and share interest in blogging. the group consists of some very known bloggers and some newbies. What is distinguishing here is the fact that the group intends to ascend to greater heights by virtue of collaboration and shared leadership.. this is a community of bloggers..
The Delhi Bloggers Event is being conducted as per the following schedule:
Date: Saturday, January 12, 2008
Time: 12:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Westend Greens Farmhouse, (Near shiv murti NH-8), New Delhi
(More details on the location are located here).
The agenda of the event is as follows:
12:30 PM – Registration Starts
1:00 PM : Welcome and group Announcements
1:30 PM : Marketing your Blog
2:00 PM : Blog Monetisation
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM : TEA BREAK
3:00 PM : Webcast with prominent blogger
3:30 PM : Beginning with Blogging and Allied Services (Digg/ Del.icio.us)
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM : Open Forums Discussions
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM : Structured Networking
We will be finalising the event sessions shortly.
There is NO Registration Fee for attending this event. We thank our sponsors for supporting the initiative.
You can immidiately register yourself for the event at: http://wiki.delhibloggers.in/delhi-bloggers-meets
And in case you have not yet joined the new groups, please join at: http://groups.google.com/group/thedelhibloggers
I will be attending the event, will you be there?
India is truly a developer haven and Bangalore the developer capital. Microsoft User Group communities have existed in this garden city for around 5 years now!
Hats off to the volunteers who have worked hard to get to this and have an unending passion and enthusiasm for sharing their knowledge and the community!
i know that this has been a long and ardous journey for the volunteers that is still on. i have seen the problems the group has faced from lack of venue to meet, to lack of speakers, to lack of laptops and projectors and even sometimes lack of attendees :).. but this journey has been very fulfilling for me and the MVPs who took this as a personal challenge and gave this group their time, expertise and their heart!
I think on this Independence Day, it is time to let impossible’s be done.. for those who thought that Microsoft communities can’t exist, let this be known in actions more than words.. for other communities anywhere else in the world, let this be a guiding light!
If you are a Microsoft techie and based in Bangalore, you can join this revolution at: http://groups.msn.com/bdotnet and it doesn’t cost a rupee!
We have iterated the numerous benefits of participating in the technical communities many times. Today morning I received a mail from one of the community members who recently discovered the benefits of the community. It is those words that truly capture the value of community:
How contributing to the community has helped me:
- Understanding real life problems.
- Using Microsoft Style guide extensively to explain the procedure.
- Thinking out of the box, which was initially limited. It has sharpened by brain a lot.
- Making me think thing globally rather than locally.
- Interacting with other renowned MVP around the globe.
- Makes me appreciate the applications capability and good people to grow with.
Above all it has helped me a lot, lot, lot.
Here is a great effort to award the Top Indian Blogs: http://www.indibloggies.org
This comes close on the heels of the reports that there are around 13.5 million blogs in India. The shortlist has 175 blogs in various categories from 750 nominations received. That’s a awful lot lesser than the “supposed” no of blogs we have in India. Just hope that the participation grows in this blogging contest.
There was a developer blog contest done by MS India some time ago as well at: http://www.microsoft.com/india/blogstars/
I am totally impressed with the way of nominating the blog for the award – through del.icio.us and that makes it ultra community oriented.
Now, I am a techie at heart. So i quickly jumped in the Science/ Technology area. Some very interesting blogs have made it to the category. I was however disappointed to see certain blogs with no tech content featured in the category. I point to:
http://shallowthgts.blogspot.com/
http://balancinglife.blogspot.com/ – based on the comment from the author, I agree that this blog is about “science” not “technology”.
Jurors please don’t include blogs in Science/ Technology when they don’t write about anything else. Do you want to reconsider this category ?
It is SUPERB that the list of jurors is available. Why not go a step ahead and announce the award criteria as well? Is it only the no. of votes that a blog receives?
I think the criteria’s got to be more than no of votes – the influence of blogs in the blogosphere. you can measure it today with various tools available.
I propose the following format:
- Popularity of blogs based on votes (30% weight)
- Influence of blogs based on bloginfluence.net (40% weight)
- Blog Age (10% weight)
- No. of blog posts for duration under consideration (10% weight)
- Juror’s Vote (10% weight)
(ideally i would also love to get the no. of comments made in the blog as a criteria but we can’t measure that objectively yet)
Stack rank each blog based on above in each category. multiply that with the weightage of the factor. total up the rank. The blog with lowest score should give you the winners.
I illustrate that with an example.
Based on the criteria we have the following stack rankings for each blog based on the above mentioned criteria:
| Blog X | Blog Y | Blog Z | |
| Popularity | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Influence | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Blog Age | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| No. of Posts | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Juror’s Post | 3 | 1 | 2 |
Now the calculation:
| Blog X | Blog Y | Blog Z | |
| Popularity (0.3) | 0.3 | 0.9 | 0.6 |
| Influence (0.4) | 0.8 | 0.4 | 1.2 |
| Blog Age (0.1) | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| No. of Posts (0.1) | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| Juror’s Vote (0.1) | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| TOTAL | 1.8 | 1.6 | 2.4 |
From the above, Blog Y is the BEST blog followed by Blog X and Blog Z.
What say?
Any community builder (and i have been for past 3 years in emerging market like India) comes to a point when he thinks, let’s take stock. The no. of influencers he has been able to connect with is one of the main areas. This is the set of people who will stand with you and you will for them. The success of community IMHO depends on these friends!
For a professional, it is important to measure everytime.. so when do you know you have achieved with the community what you set out to achieve i.e. get your influencers. is there a way to quantify the right amount of influencers whom you have connected with and recognised?
Having more no. of influencers are always desirable, there are following pitfalls to consider as well:
- Having “too many” recognised influencers lowers the value of recognition. Then recognising someone has no value.
- Having a lot of influencers might mean that one has lowered the bar of quality for influencers.
- Having too less of them would mean that you are leaving some very valuable people out of the circle.
All of the above are not nice scenarios to have.
Here is a measure that saw, modified and used to reach the “optimal” no. of influencers:
It is based on the 90-9-1 theory proposed by Jakob Nielsen in the article:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Steve Rubel also links to it as:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/10/lurkers_outnumb.html
I would like to propose that the no. 1% is good to be used for general purposes. One should look at the size of the community to tune this no. further.
If a community is as large as 1.8 million users (approx. users on MS newsgroups) it would throw up 18,000 influencers (using 1%) from newsgroups alone. This is way above the no of influencers that MS recognizes from all its community avenues. I considered the various sized communities, their influencers and then verified with my gut feel:
| Community members | Estimated No of Influ | My Comments |
Feels Right | |
| Very large communities | 1,800,000 | 18000 | Way off charts!!! | 3500 (0.2%) |
| Large communities | 50,000 | 500 | Seems preposterous | 50 (0.1%) |
| Average sized Community | 5000 | 50 | Starts to feel large | 10 (0.2%) |
| Small community | 500 | 5 | Feels alright | 1 (0.2%) |
Given the above data, there seems to be that there is a theoretical percentage of 0.2% that can be considered as the optimum..
So a company willing to invest in community and influencers should target in the range of 0.2 – 1% of community members to be recognised.
when technology is a part of the whole! 