Thank you for coming. When I look at all of you out there, and think about the talent of the people who are presenting over the next three days, I have to wonder… “What am I doing here?” Look at all the MVPs up here. It looks like a wall of Who’s Who in SharePoint. There’s Dustin Miller, who I saw present to a room of 2000 people at SharePoint Conference. There’s Matt Passannante who will literally get down on his knees and BEG people during his presentations. Heather Solomon, the Queen of Theme. Michael Doyle, the SharePoint Ninja. RuvenGotz, the SharePoint Mind Manager Wizard. Wanda Yu, Senior SharePoint Product Manager at Microsoft. What in the world could I say that these people don’t already know?
So I asked Danny, “Why are you inviting me?”
“I don’t know JACK about SharePoint!”
Consistently ranked in the top of Technorati for SharePoint blogs.
Fighting with Microsoft for the top spot in PostRank.
Then I started thinking… how is the site doing? 50,000 page views a week…
… 13,000 subscribers to the EUSP Weekly Newsletter.
Then I realized my value to this group: I am an organizer of community. I am building a community platform for people to learn and discuss SharePoint.
SharePoint is a phenomenon like I’ve never seen before. In the past I’ve taken part in communities for Perl, VoiceXML, Amplitheatre production houses, classical music groups… but there is nothing like SharePoint. It is a “non-exclusive” club where anyone can enter, no matter what the skill level.
Then I realized my value to this group: I am an organizer of community. I am building a community platform for people to learn and discuss SharePoint.
My introduction to the SharePoint Community was through the SharePointU.com forums. Dustin Miller had setup a public forum where anyone could post a question and the community could answer. It was completely unmoderated. When I started, I didn’t really know the power of participating in a forum like that. I found myself answering a couple questions a day. Then, I started seeing more traffic on EndUserSharePoint.com coming directly from SharePointU.com. The more questions I answered, the more traffic I got! Dustin also included EndUserSharePoint.com as one of the blogs in his community blog aggregator.
It took a while, but I started to recognize that there was a much bigger community than I imagined.
http://www.SharePointSaturday.orgCommunity Organizer: Michael Lotter
http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/dashboard.actionCommunity Leader: Jeremy Thake
http://sharepointchick.com/archive/2010/01/18/free-emagazine-on-sharepoint-2010.aspxCommunity Leader: Marianne van Wanrooij
There is a common theme that runs through all SharePoint Communities: One person has taken responsibility for the well being of the community.
The ability to contribute and participate through comments, questions and guest articles.
1% of the audience are your evangelists. Nurture them. Feed them. Do whatever it takes to keep them with you. It’s much harder to entice an evangelist into your group than it is to keep one.
1% of the audience are your evangelists. Nurture them. Feed them. Do whatever it takes to keep them with you. It’s much harder to entice an evangelist into your group than it is to keep one.
JeremyThake – Founder and Editor of SharePointDevWiki.com
Joel Oleson – Founder and Editor SharePointJoel.com
Thank you for coming. When I look at all of you out there, and think about the talent of the people who are presenting over the next three days, I have to wonder… “What am I doing here?” Look at all the MVPs up here. It looks like a wall of Who’s Who in SharePoint. There’s Dustin Miller, who I saw present to a room of 2000 people at SharePoint Conference. There’s Matt Passannante who will literally get down on his knees and BEG people during his presentations. Heather Solomon, the Queen of Theme. Michael Doyle, the SharePoint Ninja. RuvenGotz, the SharePoint Mind Manager Wizard. Wanda Yu, Senior SharePoint Product Manager at Microsoft. What in the world could I say that these people don’t already know?