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Some Suggestions to Have a Better Microsoft Community

We're all a part of a big community known as Microsoft community which, for itself, consists of several smaller communities like ASP.NET community or C# community.

One of the common things and activities around Microsoft community is finding some ways to keep it active and make it better day after day and many guys provide their suggestions and opinions to achieve this. On the other hand, every year Microsoft and its partners spend a good amount of money and other resources to achieve their goals on the community.

While Microsoft community is active as is, but I think that it can be much better with some innovations and mind works.

As I had stated before, community for Microsoft is much more important than what it is for other companies and technology groups. For Microsoft, community is somehow a replacement for the lack of good foundation for open source and also covers open source as a smaller part of itself.

Microsoft leadership and almost all development teams inside Microsoft have been trying to make things better around the community because without a good community they can loose the game with their competitors.

Here I just want to outline some suggestions for the Microsoft community that I think they may help it to some extent. Regarding the good resources that Microsoft has and the amount of resources that it currently spends on community and of course, its business positions in the software world, these suggestions are easily achievable.

One of the first things that should be regarded at Microsoft is having a good structure for community leadership and management inside the company. We all know that there are lots of smaller roles that are dedicated to the community (or as a side-effect target the community) like evangelism teams and MVP program team but I think that there should be a General Community Manager role (or something like that) at Microsoft who's just responsible to work with others in a high level to improve the community. I may have missed something here but I never heard of such a role. I think that this role is currently being done by several smaller roles in different teams.

This role (that I call it General Community Manager here) can be responsible to define short-time and long-time strategies for the community and even can manage the evangelism or MVP teams. A General Community Manager can define annual strategies for the community and help guys inside and outside to achieve these goals.

One of the main negative points about the Microsoft community is the lack of a good support from Microsoft for its communities including sites, forums or open source projects. A General Community Manager (and his/her teams) can make this happen and shorten the distances between the company and the community.

For instance, such a role can be responsible to get an annual budget and then dedicate it to some groups of community activities to improve them. For example, he can define a budget for sites that provide articles and tutorials, something for forums, something for open source projects, something for book publishers and authors and so on. Then they can define a timeline for their recognition process and ask community members for the bests of each field and help them.

The other way to help the community can be a new event that is dedicated to giving out awards to community owners and leaders. Microsoft can invite bests of the year and give them some awards every year. Something like Oscar awards for cinema which creates a atmosphere around the community.

Moreover, having such a single source of management and leadership can help to organize big goals for the community annually such as defining a slogan for the community for each year. For instance, we can have something like "Open Source, Open License" that targets helping and improving .NET open source projects that provide open and free licenses to fill the gap here.

All this stuff can help to have a centralized role and strategy for community leadership, management and support. In my opinion there are different positions at Microsoft that play a role in this process and I also think that this has led to missing many opportunities on the community. There are many guys who have been contributing good stuff to the community that didn't get a good support from Microsoft.

Regardless of the topic of having a main role for community management, I think that Microsoft should revisit some of its current strategies for the community.

There are several aspects of this but one main thing, in my opinion, is the fact that Microsoft doesn't have a good strategy to target all levels of developers on the community. Current strategies are defined in a way that they target a specific group of community leaders, experts and active members and others are beyond the scope. For instance, Microsoft and its partners have many events and conferences around the world but the main focus is inside the states. Moreover, I see that all these conferences are missing their quality and their numbers are just arising. By nature, these conferences and events are a good way to improve the community but at a logical level. What I see is, the core attendees of these events are some regular names and experts and this doesn't target lower levels of the community.

At the end, I would say that one of the main things that inspired me to write this post was something that I noticed recently. I found that Microsoft community is almost unable to keep the progress based on its power and %100 depends on the company. Follow the activity level and see that it goes down whenever Microsoft doesn't announce new stuff publicly. In the opposite direction, a new announcement from the Microsoft makes the community active. One recent experience was the latest couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure that a simple statistical analysis proves this.

2 Comments : 04.27.08

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