On unbecoming a MVP (a romantic note on tech volunteering)

My favorite Irish blogger Paschal has expressed some discontent about the recent MVP awards. With tech volunteering: there is much to learn in addition to giving it back to the community - improving leadership and communications skills, to name a few. One of my most enjoyable volunteer jobs was to teach senior citizens how to use the Internet at my local library. To see them do and learn how to send emails to their grand-kids, track their pension investments or a retired art school-teacher surf to the Louvre website brought an inner joy. But I learned a lot from that experience as well - it improved my communications skills. For me to translate technical knowledge in very simple English terms was something tremendous.

Other volunteering and semi-volunteering tasks has brought me some merits and benefits as well: I am (was) fairly active in the Groove Support Forums for ~4 years and with ~1400 posts, it put me in the top 5 on the forums contribution list. This effort has got me several clients who sought my professional services. I manage and contribute to numerous Groove spaces in Healthcare, Business & Technical development and other (non-political) topics. The space members are from various organizations - Groove Networks, Red Cross, CARE, US Army, US Navy, Booze-Allen, McKinsey, IBM and numerous small companies from over 20 countries. In the recent Tsunami relief efforts - I got Scobelized! (Now that MSFT has acquired Groove - may be they'll have MVP Groove category :-).

Currently, along with Carl Franklin, we manage the Connecticut .NET Developers Group. We couldn't have imagined six months ago when we started that it would be so well received. To me, it is yet another learning experience that tech volunteering brings. In this case, getting to know the needs of .NET users and the software development industry and for a software entrepreneur that is priceless knowledge.

Tech volunteering is a labor of love and as folks in the land of the Blarney Stone know - unrequited love is the best kind.

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