How to raise your community profile
Yesterday a friend e-mailed me and "ranted" about some stuff. I never get sick of "rants" or "ramblings" they're the best kinds of conversations. The kind where I can just say what I'm actually thinking without having the burden of wondering whether or not I sound like a complete idiot! One part of his "rant" asked about how I'd managed to get involved with things such as ASPInsiders (A question similar to this was also asked on Scott Mitchell's blog recently).
Having glorified my status by telling him about all the stuff that I've done in the past, I paused to reflect on the ASPInsiders group itself.
People in that group are, on the whole, a bunch of individuals that have shown great interest and dedication in helping out within the community in some way over an extended period of time.
Just about everyone will have heard of members such as G. Andrew Duthie, Scott Mitchell, Dino Esposito, Steve Smith and Dan Wahlin (to name a few) and are eminently aware of their vast inputs and achievements over an extended period of time. There are other members - such as Scott Cate, David Penton, Brad Kingsley and Colt Kwong - who have been just as active in different roles.
What I'm building up to here is that, members of that group have, over time, built a level of trust both between individual members and also between Microsoft and the group as a complete entity.
If you're a single guy or gal out there today, and you are wondering how you can start to raise you community profile I'd offer this advice. Plan to be recognized as "active". It won't take long to stand out in the crowd - remember that, of the 50 or so members of the ASPInsiders, there's always at least a few of them either moderating ASP.NET forum posts, ASPAlliance lists posts or attending INETA group member meetings.
Work out how you can get involved, and plan to do it consistently. It doesn't matter whether you're doing something high profile such as writing an ASP.NET bestseller, answering questions on a list, or even uploading useful helper widgets for the community to use and benefit from. Just start by getting recognized. Pretty soon, you'll find that, even the current ASPInsider members start turning to you as a trusted source of information!
... now, of course, having mentioned all of that I should also add that, while elevating one's presence in the community will no doubt help get to get you noticed for things like AspInsiders, I should be note that it is not the mission of the ASPInsiders group's mission to recognize community involvement, but rather to provide early feedback to the ASP.NET product team on upcoming features of future versions of ASP.NET.
A quick riddle
Think of words ending in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everybody uses everyday. If you have listened carefully, I've already told you what it is.