In the discussions that I have with other members of my team, the roles that exist and will exist in our Community fall under a greater category of Contributors.  “Wait, I thought we were talking about authors?” Yes, we are.  But there’s a lot more to do than ’just’ write a course or create some e-learning….

People engage in communities to differing degrees.  In the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, the authors describe what they call Social Technographics.  This classifies people according to how they use social technologies.  The categories the authors define are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives (if you’re really intrigued by this, check the linked presentation, or better yet read the book).  Anyway, our Community is made of mostly Creators and Critics.

The Creators write the learning content, whatever its form, but there are a few more functions, too. These include:

• Maintainer – these people take it upon themselves to take something and make it better. An analog might be someone who, after buying a used car, begins tweaking the engine, rebuilding the body, installing a new sound system, etc. In our Community, they agree to revise, update, correct and improve an existing course (could be a learning product that Microsoft placed there, or it this could be in agreement with the Community author who, for whatever reason, decides not to maintain their course).
• Localizer – I’ve come in contact with a large number of these enthusiastic people in the past few weeks.  They see the content on the Microsoft Learning Courseware Library (today mostly in English and some Japanese), know of opportunities in their part of the world for, say, a course in Silverlight 2.0, in their own language, and so agree to localize the content into their language.  Most times they also agree to become the maintainers for their localized course….it really makes sense.  They become intimately familiar with their translation, so maintaining is a natural.
• Virtual Machine (VM) Expert – The expertise around building VMs, diff drives and the granular, ‘niggling bits’ around getting it right, stable, consistent and, for release, compliant (as defined by the Courseware Library release process) is hard won. These experts can offer their services to the Community to those who don’t have that depth of ability, or just don’t have the time.

The Critics are valuable to the Community as they perform the technical reviews of courses, providing the kind of feedback to the authors that allow them to improve and adjust their existing offering. These folks include a large number of the professional Trainers who teach the courses week in and week out.  They provide feedback not only via the standard classroom surveys, but can go into the Courseware Library and be more specific and give the course a star rating.  Over time, this obviously makes the better courses easier to identify and the ones that aren’t doing so well also show up. Again, this is where the Authors and Maintainers can jump in and start changing the course to better meet the customer needs, as well as just perform sustained engineering.

So, in case you felt that, by NOT being an author there was no way to join this Community, think again.  There’s lot of room.