yag: Community and Architecture : Community

Community-based music producing

YAG — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:47:00 GMT

Many years ago I saw Jill Sobule do a show - and I enjoyed her sense of humor and stage presence. Bought a few of her CDs to check them out. Anyway, was looking around today and found this site. It's called Jill's Next Record! and asks the community at large to help her produce her CD. She offers various things for different levels of support - and keeps a tally on the site (currently at around $26,000). Some of my favorites:

$25 - Polished Rock Level: An advance copy of the CD. Weeks before the masses.

$50 - Pewter Level: An advance copy and a "Thank You" on the CD.

$500 - Gold Level: This is where it gets good! At the end of my CD, I'll do a fun instrumental track where I'll mention your name and maybe rhyme with it. And if you don't want your name used, you can give me a loved one's instead. What a great gift!

$750 - Gold Doubloons Level: Exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money.

$5,000 — Diamond Level: I will come and do a house concert for you. Invite your friends, serve some drinks, bring me out and I sing. Actually, this level is a smart choice economically. I've played many house concerts where the host has charged his guests and made his money back. I'd go for this if I were you.

Heck, for $10,000 you can sing on the CD or play cowbell - your choice. <g> Never too much cowbell...

Anyway, just a data point for how things are changing in this more connected society.

Devteach in Vancouver and Party with Palermo

YAG — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:41:00 GMT

I'll be speaking on Silverlight at Devteach in Vancouver the week of November 26th. Devteach is an awesome conference - and this year has a full track on XNA - which should be interesting. And improving on things this year, Jeff Palermo is throwing one of his "Party with Palermo" free parties at the conference! The one he put together here in Seattle at the MVP Summit last year was a ton of fun. Hope you can make it

Almost forgot - some dude named Ken Levy is doing the keynote. Wonder what that's all about? <gd&r>

German VFP, SQL Server and .NET conference in October

YAG — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:51:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany on November 8-10. I'll be keynoting the VFP conference and doing a session on VB.NET (including things like LINQ, Silverlight and future releases). This is one of my all time favorite conferences - Rainer really focuses on the attendees - great food, lots of chances for 1:1s with the speakers and other attendees, just an overall wonderful time. Click on the pictures to go to the website for the conference.

Did Blogs save Microsoft?

YAG — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:02:00 GMT

Here's a great post about blogging and its usefulness in corporations. The quote I wanted to point out:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized, and simply the underlying values.

My first month or two at Microsoft I was in a meeting with Steve Ballmer and other VPs. We were talking about blogging, responding on Newsgroups, Forums, etc. The thing I remembered most about the meeting - and what made me so happy to be here was around the discussion of written standards. Steve (and Eric Rudder if I recall correctly) basically ended the conversation with "we hire smart people, let's trust them to be smart about what they do".

Like Gerald says, this comes from the underlying values...

Off to Prague!

YAG — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:31:00 GMT

I'll be leaving this week for the annual VFP Devcon in Prague, Czech Republic. This is the largest VFP conference in the world and I had a great time there last year. Great speakers, great price.

We have a beta up and available

YAG — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:46:00 GMT

I wrote a little while ago about what we were trying to accomplish with our efforts. Well, the initial beta is out. This will hopefully give you some insight into what we're working on, and a place for you to give us feedback. The overall information, FAQs, videos, and other good things are here. You can also go directly to the sites:

Forums: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/forums
Blogs: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/blogs (I will start posting here).
TagSpace: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/tagspace

A few points to make. This release focused on basic functionality, you will be seeing more releases coming with additional features, bug fixes etc., coming on a pretty regular basis. Can't wait to hear your feedback!

Watch the videos directly...

YAG — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:37:00 GMT

Some folks contacted me and said that they'd prefer to watch the videos I mention below directly. Here they are:

Bob's video:

Video: It's All About Bringing People Together

and my video:

Video: The Architect's Perspective

Some Microsoft.community videos up on Soapbox

YAG — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:58:00 GMT

Gotta run to a friend's for dinner, but wanted to point out a few videos up on Soapbox. One video is of Bob Rebholz - our Group Product Manager, and one is of me. Both videos talk about some of what we're working on.

Showing what we got...

YAG — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:04:00 GMT

When I left the developer division a number of months ago, people were curious as to why. I explained that this new gig was one that kept me awake at night thinking of all the cool things we could be doing. I wrote a little about this when I first joined the team.

Well, now everyone can see an early view of what we've been working on - what we like to call Microsoft.Community. Doug has a great post on what it looks like and its manifestation. I want to talk about how we got there, the thought process behind it.

To give a quick overview, Microsoft.Community is made up of three pillars, Community Discovery Services, Community Membership Services, and Community Discussion Services. Community Discovery Services enables social bookmarking and tagging, Community Membership Services provides membership and reputation services. Finally Community Discussion Services provides threaded discussion services.

On top of these, we have a number of sites. TagSpace is the codename for our social networking and tagging collection site. ClaimSpace is the codename for our explicit reputation management site. Finally, our blog and forum sites will eventually move over to new versions built on the Community Discussion Services.

That's a really quick overview. Before reading on, I highly recommend that you read Doug's post for more details. I'll wait <g>.

Welcome back! As I said before, I want to talk about how we got to this group of services and sites. To do this, I want to give you insight into our discussions.

The underlying question in all this is how do we connect people? How do we connect people to resources across the web, to communities, to other people with similar interests? I've been a big community member and booster for over 20 years - on Compuserve, offering space for local user groups when I had my own company, offering speakers to local groups whenever needed, etc, Most of my best friends have come from the communities that I participated in. People from the community have stayed with me for weeks when they've needed a place, I've never been alone in a new city when going there for work because somehow, there was always someone I knew around - even if we'd never met in person. So, to me, community is an inherent goodness.

But even if it isn't inherently good, community is also useful from a learning perspective. If you find a great KB article that answers your question, you are happy. If you belong to a user group and point it out to someone else, more people are happy. If you blog about it, and those who read your blog or do a search find it, they are happy. The interesting thing is that a social, trusted network is a great way of spreading information. But how do you build that social, trusted network? How do you find the right community or people? How do you enable those communities to form at will? That's what we were asking.

Any community needs certain things in order to exist. You have to identify people who may want to be part of your community, connect them together in a venue and reward them for taking part in the community.

If you look at a user group, it meets these criteria. You typically name the user group thru its identification (The Bay Area Database Developers Association, for instance). You meet monthly in a certain location, with people getting to know each other during breaks or before or after the session. You also reward people through the natural activities - you get information, get to learn to speak better, possibly find a job (most user groups start with the question - is anyone looking for or does anyone have a job?).

Codeplex, does much of the same, but in an online, disconnected mode. It's made up of lots of communities that self-form around a project in which they have interest. It has tools (source control, tags, wikis, forums, work items) that are geared around what is needed for those types of communities. By participating in the community thru its own Codeplex project, the Codeplex team hears from folks about what else is needed and thru agile delivery, provides it quickly enough to keep the underlying strata firm and useful enough to let the communities continue to grow.

If we draw these four requirements, we can see how the services and sites provide what is needed to match these requirements.

OK. So now we have the basic outline of what we want to create. Let's look at a more architectural view for these same things. We have the services laid out horizontally and can use any combination of these for sites. With the great work of our Product Managers we coalesced on a few core sites to start. These are listed vertically, with their lower range showing which services they consume. We began, of course, with our existing sites - forums and blogs. They make use of all the services (Doug discussed one of my favorite scenarios - building your own forum based on tags). The two new sites, codenamed TagSpace and ClaimSpace make use of the two top services.

Wanting to open this up over time (using this on sites of our scale means that we have to slowly grow and be sure that we can handle this), we opted to provide a RESTful interface to all our services and we plan to embrace some of the emerging standards you see with Web 2.0 sites.

Wow! This has taken a while. In future entries, I plan to drill down into some of these services, and as we work further on cacheing and scaling techniques, talk about some of what we learn.

In any case - it's really exciting to have this stuff ready to ship. We want to get your feedback (look here for a post when it's live) and hope to release updates pretty regularly as we move forward.

How I feel about making the VFP announcement

YAG — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:53:00 GMT

I said earlier that I wasn't really ready to talk about how I feel about the announcement. I did, however, post something on the Universal Thread last week in response to a question that a few folks have told me I should post here. Interestingly enough, since I know so many people on the UT personally, though it was hard, I felt more comfortable writing it there.

That said, I understand that there's a group of people here who are not on the UT - and like I said, enough friends and people I trust have told me that I should do this, that here you go. As one long time VFP developer said - this will show people that MSFT is made up of people who have feelings also. That may actually make a good post in itself for one day.

Anyway, this is what I posted in response to how I felt being the one to make the announcement (and read the hundreds of messages, take the phone calls, etc.). Also, please note that I wrote this while in one of the MVP presentations last week during the summit.

yag

---------------------------

Good and bad. Like everything else, I guess.

I was one of the first people to bring VFP into corporations and write books about it and publish dev standards. Incredibly blessed to be part of this community - met most of my best friends here, got to work with Ken and Paul on VFP3 as vendors, got to work with the team the past few years.

I feel very proud of how hard everyone has worked on the product. I feel proud of how even newcomers like Milind got into the community (favorite quote "when I don't have the monthly letter up on time, I get emails asking if my back went out again. They are amazing").

I'm amazed at what the community has done to work with us on the product. Localization, helping each other, Codeplex stuff, etc. I'm happy that this will continue.

I'm sad that this moment has come, but I'm glad that I was here to make sure it was handled as well as it could be. I'm proud that there was never a question that we would openly stand up and share the decision when it was final and participate in these conversations. I'm glad that I could tell the MVPs in person. I'm glad that I could spend the time to read well over 500 messages and counting (between here, other forums, newsgroups, my email).

I am humbled by the reaction of some of my friends from over the years (ex-Flashers, folks I haven't talked to for years) who immediately asked me "are you ok?" (and now I'm starting to tear up). I'm amazed at the number of folks on the VB.NET team and their community who've asked me the same thing. I also was humbled that when I offered to not do the keynote in Prague, in favor of someone who is leading the VFPX project, Igor wouldn't hear of it. He made me feel welcome at a time that I was worred what the reaction would be. Till then I thought that I could lose many of my friends because I made the decision to be the one to announce this. (tears are coming down now - and I'm hoping none of the MVPs around me notice).

I've been surprised that I have only gotten a few messages along the lines of "I wonder how you can sleep at night, knowing the thousands of devs who are losing their jobs this week". I've been happy that when I responded to these, talking about the decision, Codeplex, pointing to blog entries, etc., that I've always gotten apologies from the people within a few emails.

So in short, like Doug Dodge would say, I feel blessed.

yag

Interviewed at MVP Summit

YAG — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 23:45:00 GMT

Sandy, Doug and I were interviewed at the MVP Summit about some of the stuff we're doing around online community development. Check it out here.

More thoughts and comments

YAG — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:05:00 GMT

Had a few more questions come up. I'm still at the MVP summit, but keeping up as much as I can.

What about the MVPs?

The MVP program is tied to the communities, not to the products…so to the extent there are active/vital communities, we would expect to continue to recognize and award outstanding contributions. So yes, there will still be VFP MVPs.

You mentioned two VFP influenced frameworks. What are they?

Mere Mortals and Strataframe

Thoughts and comments

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:50:00 GMT

Since we made the announcement, I’ve been reading comments on this blog and others as well as various community sites like the Universal Thread. The comments have ranged from the good to the, er, not so good <g>, to the challenging. I’ve also personally spoken to over 50 different companies, people, etc., over the past two days. I’d like to give an overview of what I’ve heard, some comments, and go from there. I’m doing this in largish buckets – for simplicities sake. I’ve also received comments in English and a lot in Spanish (I suspect the folks at PortalFox have a long thread going – sorry I don’t speak Spanish or I’d jump in. I’m sure someone will translate this over there – and I appreciate that).

This was something to be expected. No need to panic though, things will continue to work. Also, Microsoft is killing VFP.

These are two sides of the discussion. Craig Berntson wrote about it on his blog in detail. I obviously agree with the “no need to panic” approach. Recently, someone blogged from OzFox about what a large percentage of people were using Fox 2.6. Note that Fox 2.6 hasn’t been supported for years, but it still works (if anyone has a pointer to this post, I’d love to link, but I can’t find it). It is an opportunity to start exploring what other programming languages you might like to learn.

Additionally, VFP will continue to be supported for 8 more years. The MVP program will continue as long as there’s a community. The capabilities will continue to grow with things like VFPX. In fact, one of the things I’m proudest of is that while we can’t open source the core, the extensibility model allows folks to keep adding new capabilities.

How are you doing, yag? What about the team?

This was really nice. I didn’t expect to get so many people asking how I’m doing. A similar issue came up at the MVP meeting where people asked what the team would be doing. It’s so nice when people realize that we’re part of the community and are affected by this also. Calvin and I have both been involved with Fox for over 20 years. In the MVP meeting, we had three of the original MVPS (Calvin, Tamar and myself). Brought back a lot of memories.

I’m moving to Linux, Python, etc.

Where you want to go from here is really up to you. I can say, however, that the VFP team is working on the next version of VB.NET (as we’ve talked about for over a year now), and there are some interesting tools that help you either go to .NET, or integrate new .NET code with your VFP applications. There are also at least two .NET frameworks written by folks who come from VFP. There is also a good community on the Universal Thread made up of VFP people who have already added .NET to their repertoire. But again, it’s up to you.

Thank you for giving us the chance to keep this going ourselves

Alex Feldstein blogged about this. He focuses on the fact that VFP “is a mature product with a great set of features”. He’s happy that we’re releasing Sedna at no charge and making the source code available to be enhanced by the community. He also gives a nod to the community projects that are already out there (and they are awesome – GDI+ support, an Outlook toolbar control, integration with MSBuild, and much more).

How about open sourcing the core product too?

We’ve been asked this for years. That’s not going to happen. The main reason is that there is too much intellectual property in the VFP core codebase. Someone on the Universal Thread also noted that it’s written in C and C++. How many folks in the community are prepared to learn an 18 year old codebase in a language that they don’t typically use? I know that I wouldn’t take it on. <g> Think back to code you’ve written and maintained for 18 years. Now picture giving it to someone else.

Twenty years and counting...

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:33:00 GMT

I was talking to some of the MVPs today about the VFP announcement that we've made and we started talking about some of the things we've shared over the years. I've been involved with Fox since Foxbase days back in 1986 or so. Many of my best friends come from the community.

I'm not really ready to talk about everything that I'm feeling right now, but I do think that taking major portions of the product and setting it loose in the community via Codeplex just feels right. Foxbase, FoxPro and VFP have always been driven by the needs of the folks that use it (I remember the first feature that I remember directly influencing); and that can continue due to our rich extensibility.

As far as the team goes - we're going to finish the work on SP2 and on Sedna. And that's going to be our focus tomorrow and on thru summer.

MVP Summit!

YAG — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 09:46:00 GMT

Tomorrow afternoon, the fun begins. First, a BBQ at Rod Paddock's house, followed by the Palermo Party. Lots of folks from my team will be at the latter - should be great. Then, on to business, our Community team is throwing breakfasts on Monday and Friday for around 20 MVPs each - to talk about some of the stuff we're working on. Likewise, the VFP team and I will be meeting with the 20+ VFP MVPs who are coming in.

I'll also be hanging out at the summit all week - and Sandy and I are being interviewed for a Podcast. I'll post a link once that's online. Have a great week!