Real Time Engagment for Community Leaders

[Allen]

@Reza_Ameri-Archived

Thank you for the suggestion. At the moment we have provided a community space for speakers and leaders to discuss and post to. I am not opposed to having a more real-time method of communication but I can not commit to it at the moment.

Please do socialize your idea and get it some upvotes as that helps us as a team prioritize ideas and suggestions. 

[Allen]

This doesnt sound like it would scale very well to me.

Also who do you mean by community leaders?

would this be open 24/7?

[Reza_Ameri-Archived]

I am not sure why it won't scale well.

In user groups , we used to have a role called Community Leader who are the one who works directly with Microsoft and they are in charge of define strategy and managing the community. Another name is Community President or Manager but we always used the word Community Leader in Microsoft User Group.

It would be nice to have 24/7, may be it would be nice to have private forum too.

[Allen]

@Reza_Ameri-Archived 

Sorry Reza - I feel like I am not really understanding your ask. Let me break down what you have said and repeat it as I am understanding it so we can make sure we are talking about the same things.

When you say User Groups, do you mean events organized by the community to discuss Microsoft products etc? what we call Community events?

I get that Community Leader is someone who owns it but what strategy are the defining? do you mean they work out what events to hold and when?

Sorry if I am not being clear I am just wanting to understand what we are asking. 

[Reza_Ameri-Archived]

I apologize for not being clear, I am using the old naming for user groups and I believe name already been changed , so let me explain about the old definition first and then answer your questions.

Microsoft created a website called Microsoft User Group Support Service , later on it changed to Microsoft Technical Community and there we had several roles including:

1-Community Leader: he/she creates proposal for user group strategy like organizing events, create plan for community events , call speakers and was in charge of communicating with Microsoft related to the user group , so everything including funding, sponsorship from Microsoft and so on given to him/her. Community Leaders was responsible for everything happening in the community and if community was inactive like there wasn't any event or discussion or anything, he or she should be take responsibility.

2-Event Manager: Someone who was in charge of managing and organizing entire event and collecting feedback and call for speaker and report to the leader.

3-Speaker: same concept someone who was doing speaking in the event.

User Group actually was a community with a given name for example Microsoft Security Community or so on and has community leader assigned to it and it was a group with a given name, organizing event was the main task of user group but there are other things like creating discussion group, blogging, sending technical contents and so on. Sometimes, a user group call for speakers and there was speakers associated with a user group. Generally, it facilitate organizing events and create community of experts. Organizing event was only one of tasks for user group (and the main one) but to do so, they need to have group and that group called User Group or Technical Community.

As for the leader, one of their tasks was to organizing event and facilitate it. But they were contacting point between Microsoft and User Group and let me tell you about strategy, for example, they review situation in their area and define upcoming events and create strategies for speakers. For example, at one time I did analyze and figure out people are not familiar with Windows 8.1 and they wonder why we should upgrade, so I put event about Windows 8.1 on my agenda and then I checked dates and holidays , location and other factors ( a process of data analysis) and create best date for event and call speakers and book venue. In addition, I keep posting topics about Windows 8.1 security. I also have practice that I am asking something called pre-event question , where I ask for example what is your biggest concern and I create contents based on that. I also define strategy for one year like how many events are being planned and topics and so on. Strategy is basically was related to planning user group contribution in upcoming year.

I should apologize but not being cleared.

Please feel free to ask any question which could help you with clarifying.

[Allen]

@Reza_Ameri-Archived 

Thank you for clarifying, as you know the Microsoft Technical Community was shutdown last year, as was all its services and staffing. We took over the user groups to at least give them somewhere they could share events, find speakers and grow their audience.

We would have loved to have been able to continue the program in full but that wasn't possible. At this time this is not an ask we can accommodate but I would love to keep hearing any ideas you have.