Keyvan Nayyeri

You're surprised? Yes, it's not about Subkismet this Friday!

You probably know about Community Credit as a community-based site that collects information about community contributions of its members and recognizes active members every month.

Many of the well-known community members are members of this site and they recognize their members based on the number of points that they could achieve every month. There is a list of points for each community activity that a member can achieve after submitting it to his or her profile and approving by the administrators.

I've been following this site via its newsletter but never tried to update my profile. There were some reasons including my limited time and the fact that I had a wrong understanding of the site goals. Initially I was thinking this site is just a place to encourage community activities and give some prizes to active members (this is probably your imagination as well). But recently I found that this site is something more and it's actually a great database of community activities and member portfolios that can be a good resource for finding your position on the community. There are already many active community members who submit their activities to the site and this lets you to find how active have you been in the time. Many of the online communities are also supporting Community Credit and are its affiliates.

Moreover, Community Credit is a good place to create a portfolio of your contributions and lets others see what has been up with you in the long time. I'm sure this can be helpful for yourself as was for me.

My primary reasons to appear on the site were:

• I wanted to have a single list of all my activities on the English community from the start to now.
• I wanted to compare myself with others and see how active I've been.

So I reactivated my account on the site and spent a few hours on publishing a list of my published articles, open source projects and community recognitions on the site (this was when I believed I haven't been very lazy in the past years!). Of course, it took a few hours from me to submit all these items and there are still many items that I haven't submitted yet. I'm going to add the remained items to my profile smoothly to see what will be there overall!

After adding my activities for January 2008 (to now), I saw that I'm the 4th top active members in the list and that was very interesting!

Beside reactivating my account on Community Credit, I've been lucky to find David Silverlight, the founder and administrator of the site and a Microsoft MVP for XML, who kindly helped me on submitting my items as well.

In addition to adding my profile to the site, Dave was also kind to add me and my profile to the list of featured developers on the site.

I told him that I'm going to implement the Community Credit web-service for Graffiti so he added me to the list of affiliates in order to give me an affiliate code and key as well.

A result of our conversations and my previous plans was my decision to start a new CodePlex project for Community Credit web-services where I will implement a simple C# library to simplify the work with Community Credit services and then will port the code to a Graffiti plug-in to automatically submit new Graffiti posts to Community Credit. This project is licensed under a New BSD license and since it's all about community feel free to check-in and collaborate with me on it.

At the end, if you want to have a good place to collect your community activities and haven't tried Community Credit then I'd strongly recommend you to sign up and give it a try.