I just got a question in about how to apply to be a developer MVP in Ireland and I thought the answer may interest others.. so...

If you haven't heard of it the Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP) Program, it's a program run by Microsoft to identify and reward third parties who are experts in our technologies and contribute to the developer/IT community at large. More details can be found here.

The sorts of people who become MVPs often spend a lot of time helping others on newsgroups or in offline meetings, all out of the goodness of their hearts :). You'll also find a lot of them speaking as third party experts at Microsoft and other events.

If you think you could qualify, send me in some information about what you have been up to and I can submit your application to the program owners. Or, if you know someone else who should be nominated, let me know and we can work together to build a profile.

The kind of details the program owners look for are as follows:

• Newsgroup Contributions
  • Which newsgroups?
  • Your posting alias.
  • How active are you (number of posts in what timeframe)?
• Offline community activities
• What events do you present at?
• When/how often?
• To (of for) how many people?
• What sort of people were they (e.g. general public, conference delegates, Developer User Group attendees...)
• What was the feedback from those people?
• What links can you include to samples of the activity you did - e.g. link to presentations, to feedback etc. etc.
• References from other MVPs - if you know any other MVPs and they know how much you have been contributing to communities, then it would be a good idea to include their names too as references.

The more detail you have the better, for example, 'I spoke at 4 events and got very good feedback' isn't terribly useful, something like 

'I spoke at 4 developer events in Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Galway. Each one had over 25 attendees from various Irish universities and businesses. I spoke about Windows Server 2003 implementation and the .Net compact framework - most people were really positive, and my average rating was 8/10 (click here to see ppts and reviews, also my web site)'