Back Draft
What Is an MVP, Anyway?
By Jonathan Goodyear
In the context of sports, the term MVP (Most ValuablePlayer) is not difficult to define. However, for the sports- challenged amongyou, a team?s MVP is usually either the most athletically talented player, orthe player who demonstrates the greatest leadership. Sometimes the same playerwears both hats.
In Microsoft parlance, MVP stands for Most ValuableProfessional. I?m an MVP, so people often ask me what that means. Frankly, I?veasked myself that very same question many times, and I wasn?t very confidentabout the answer I came up with. As an experiment, I asked numerous other MVPs,Microsoft employees, and other influential people in the industry theirdefinition of a Microsoft MVP. The range of answers I got was pretty broad. Iheard everything from ?MVPs are super talented developers? (Microsoft employeesare pre-programmed to use the word super in every other sentence) to ?MVPs aredevelopers who contribute to newsgroups a lot.?
While either of the previous statements may or may not bea quality of a particular MVP, it does not define what an MVP is. I didn?t haveto look much further than the official Microsoft MVP Web site to track down the?party line? on their MVP definition (http://mvp.support.microsoft.com).It defines an MVP as:
?...recognized, credible, and accessible individuals withexpertise in one or more Microsoft products who actively participate in onlineand offline communities to share their knowledge and expertise with otherMicrosoft customers.?
OK. So now that we know what an MVP is, how do you becomeone? The short answer is that someone (usually a Microsoft DeveloperEvangelist) nominates you and your case is put before a review board atMicrosoft. But what does that review board actually review? Ahh, that?s wherethe forest gets more dense. There is so much confusionas to what constitutes the proper credentials to become an MVP that many of thevery people doing the nominations don?t have it right. A scary propositionindeed!
To set the record straight, I went directly to the sourceand spoke with Sean O?Driscoll, Senior Director of the Customer Service andSupport Community and the MVP Program. Sean started off by saying that the MVPprogram is an ?award and recognition program.? While a certain amount oftechnical skill is usually needed to accomplish the tenets of MVP membership,the MVP program is in no way a measuring stick of the technical merits of itsmembers. Myth debunked.
When I asked Sean for details regarding how to become anMVP, he gave me some historical context. He said that the program was started morethan 10 years ago as a ?thank you program for outstanding contributions to thecommunity.? At the time, ?community? meant newsgroups. In my opinion, thatnarrow definition made the ambitious term MVP a bit of a misnomer. About threeyears ago, Microsoft decided that they should let their customers define what ?community?is. As a result, several other community contribution avenues were added to theMVP selection criteria. Some of these are forum postings, books, articles,blogs, and speaking at and/or leading user groups and other community events.
The key take-away here is that the MVP program is now agnosticas to the venue (online or offline) that you use to make your communitycontributions. The result should be a greater amount of diversification in theprogram?s membership, and, in some respects, it has worked. For instance, Inever would have qualified for the MVP program under its old rules, but becauseI consistently get over a million community touches a year through my articles,speaking engagements, and other non-newsgroup community contributions, the newrules make me an ideal MVP candidate.
Unfortunately, many qualified developers are not evenconsidered for MVP status, because the folks doing the nominations still thinkthat only online community contributions count. Luckily, Sean?s team is soongoing to be launching a massive campaign to educate the folks at Microsoft onthe new MVP definition and core ideals. I also have some exciting news toreport. Starting shortly after Tech Ed 2006 in Boston, the MVP Web site willhave a new section that allows existing MVPs to nominate others that they feelhave done what it takes to become an MVP. This will no doubt make sure thatfewer hardworking community contributors (especially in the offline communitychannels) get missed.
So, how do you become an MVP? You?ve got to start making alot of community contributions, preferably in more than one medium. Sean wasadamant that MVP status should not be manufactured or contrived. The MVPprogram is designed for people who would make the same community contributionseven if the program didn?t exist. Another important factor that determines MVPmembership is individual impact. As an example, a person in the Czech Republicwho speaks consistently to a group of 100 developers makes a much bigger impactthan someone who does the same in the United States. The first person?sper-capita impact is much higher, so they more adequately meet the MVPselection criteria.
By no means is the current MVP selection process perfect.Besides the aforementioned problem with educating the Developer Evangelists whodo the current nominations, there currently isn?t a place in the MVP programfor developers who make a large amount of community contributions that arespread across multiple Microsoft technologies. These individuals don?t haveenough credentials to become an MVP in any particular technology, yet whenviewed holistically, their contributions are quite large. Sean referred to thisas the ?generalist problem.? He said they are working on potential solutions,but that nothing firm was in place yet.
In the time that I spent talking to Sean, he also sharedsome interesting and exciting information about the MVP program and theprogress it has made recently. For instance, there are now over 3,100 MVPs in75 countries worldwide, covering more than 75 technologies in nine languages.The individual product teams at Microsoft are now playing a much more activerole in communicating with MVPs, which makes them much more effective atcontributing to their respective communities. In fact, 1,500 Microsoftemployees were present at the 2005 MVP Summit;that?s quite a jump from the 300 who attended the 2004 MVP Summit.
Hopefully this column has cleared some of the fogsurrounding the MVP program, and has given you some insight into the reason itexists, and how to put yourself into a position to be nominated. As aside-note, there are no program-based or regional quotas that determine howmany developers are nominated or awarded MVP status each year. So don?t getdiscouraged if you are surrounded by other hardworking community contributorswhere you live. That?s a good thing. The MVP program definitely has someobstacles to overcome, but my impression is that Sean?s team is hard at workfinding solutions to those obstacles, as well as bringing the program currentwith the latest community contribution trends.
Jonathan Goodyearis president of ASPSoft (http://www.aspsoft.com),an Internet consulting firm based in Orlando, FL. Jonathan is MicrosoftRegional Director for Florida, a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD),and author of Debugging ASP.NET (NewRiders). Jonathan also is a contributing editor for asp.netPRO. E-mail him at mailto:jon@aspsoft.comor through his angryCoder eZine at http://www.angryCoder.com.