Working in any space in a community capacity is often very difficult because there are not tangible rewards and you have to give without expecting to receive.   It's hard for some people to understand this because sometimes it eats into your time - whether it be your business hours, your family hours or for most of us, it's our sleeping hours.

In the times I've been working with DotNetNuke, not being able to code or contribute at the level I felt would be recognised as being useful and with purpose, I had to find other ways to contribute that also made a difference, and through giving away my knowledge I had by working in this space, and giving away with 'no string's attached' allowed me to help thousands of others who simply don't know where to start.

I found that over time, the majority of users within the community are in fact people like myself, who don't write modules but we use the application.  Some of use use it for our own purposes to manage our own websites and business activities, but there is a huge and growing area of those reselling or providing solutions for their customers, so being able to really solve some problems has been a great help.

The last 6 months have been of tremendous growth for me, my business is looking great at last and 2007 is a busy year with several overseas trips and at last, hopefully an investor so I can realise some of the goals I feel lacking in the DotNetNuke space. 

The honour of being award MVP (Most Valuable Professional) left me some time to research others who have achieved this award. And I felt very special because it's about effort and valuable contribution, not the certificates you hold, which means that we can all be part of it, if we show passion, compassion, integrity and perserverence.

It was very rewarding to see Shaun's post in a forum where his comments were -

When we migrated from the ASP.NET Forums, I expressed my concerns about the contributions of our community members being neglected and Microsoft promised me that they would review the forums on DotNetNuke.com for MVP consideration. In this last MVP nomination round, I called them on it and they requested that I create a report where they could review the top posters in our forums over a speific time period. I created a custom module, deployed it to the site, and gave the Microsoft MVP Lead access. I am really glad to see that this resulted in a new deserving batch of MVPs.

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So to be acknowledged in that manner was great - and he went on further to say -

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I submitted some nominations to Microsoft but they indicated they really needed an objective measuring stick so that nominations were not based purely on "who you know". Forum participation provides the most objective measurement of "community" activity from Microsoft's perspective - so I provided them with the report. The recent MVP awardees really represent a great milestone for DotNetNuke as it means that we are finally being recognized as a distinct Microsoft community ( I don't believe there are very many other third party communities which have earned this designation ). This would not have happened without growth ( size does matter ) or without having a strong, consistent community voice ( a single vision rather than many fragmented efforts ).

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So I felt that I had alot more to contribute since the discussions in the latter part of last year were to make DotNetNuke more visible.  Early in 2005, I was approached to head the skinning project team - to help educate others and maybe this will finally come to fruition.  But it got shelved for a while and that's totally understandable - since dnn 3 had just been released and there were a few problem and this year, I had hoped to see the project be picked up but Scott Willhite mentioned there was no focus on skinning for some time.  

If you want to see my MVP link you can visit it here and I will be around more next year since alot of the challenges I had in the last few months have been ticked off my list, however like anything - still a couple exist - but hey that's how it is in life.

So, all in all, Thank you to Shaun for recognising those who have supported the project and thank you to the others who may have nominated me, and of course to Microsoft - where there simply wouldn't be this award without them.  I will be in Seattle in March - so if you want to catch up -let me know.

Nina Meiers