Development Community Volunteer Week

I didn’t get to read my RSS feeds yet today but I got a hint to go read them and I discovered that Chuck wrote a nice blog post about volunteer work and me. I guess the cat’s out of the bag now :) Thanks Chuck for the kudos — I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to making a really good use of that time.

There are so many people in the development community that spend countless hours of their volunteer time. Especially in the VSTS community. People are working volunteering time:

• developing and supporting open-source projects & tools,
• speaking at events and conferences (this takes a considerable amount of time to prepare for,)
• leading local user groups,
• writing blog posts, technical articles, & books,
• answering community questions in the MSDN Forums,
• giving feedback, enhancement requests, & reporting problems of Microsoft products to improve them, and
• all of the other ways people volunteer time that I can’t even begin to think of.

I personally know several people (and more) who really focus on trying to make the entire development community better off with these time & knowledge contributions. (Infragistics as a company has been really supportive in all of our efforts to help the community.) I hope you get as much out of it as I do from learning from everyone. Microsoft has done a great job in recognizing those individuals by creating the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. I’m honored to have been awarded this award earlier this year.

I’ve really not been able to blog as much as I have liked to or participating in the MSDN Forums answering people’s questions. I have focused the volunteer time that I have had in other areas. I had a really great time at the MVP Summit earlier this year and came back with so many different ideas. I really love the VSTS MVP & Champs group — truly a great group of professionals! This brings me to my idea for this year.

I feel like I haven’t had time this year to really provide anything meaningful to the community. So, I want to dedicate a work week and do something meaningful for the VSTS community. There are plenty of places that we could all use help so I think that would be something meaningful and useful. I’m planning on doing this time locally in Redmond so that if I need background information on a project, I can get it quickly. I need to meet with some people about Infragistics stuff and really take some vacation time in that area (since it is so beautiful) so I think it’s beneficial to be local during that week.

What should I work on?

Chuck mentioned a few ideas that we have so far but the one I personally love is being able to release the gigantic amount of work that Microsoft has done with their internal process templates & reports. Have you seen them? They are awesome! Reports are so tricky to do and take a good chunk of time to be done correctly. The Microsoft internal reports need to be scrubbed for external consumption which is my initial idea for volunteer work.

Or should I work on a productivity tool?

Don’t let me taint your opinions though. What do you want/need that would be valuable for VSTS? Go to Chuck’s blog post and give us suggestions about what you would like to see me work on. No car washing or details though :) unless it’s for a good charity organization then I’ll consider it.

Ed B.