My Thoughts On Community
Rob Caron is pretty much the face of Team System, at least to a majority of the people I have talked to (myself included). He does an incredible job of organizing and publishing tons of information on his blog, and really helps to drive the Team System community.
Recently, Rob published a blog post on Community, entitled "What is Community". This is a great post to read. Rob explains in general what a community is, from his perspective, specifically a technical community. He goes on to talk about the Team System community in specifics, and how it ties into his view of community. I agree with everything he has in his post, so go read it.
I gathered from his post that there are some people in Microsoft who are not sold on community, who feel it is a resource drain that competes with product development. I would love to hear a detailed argument for why they think this. To those people I would like to say: I think you are wrong.
Personally, I see products and community as intricately linked. One cannot do well without the other.
Community is more than just responding to the occasional news group post or email. Community is about meeting and bonding with like-minded individuals. Community is about sharing information, developing a "hive-mind" which can quickly and easily find answers to problems. Community is also about growing the mind-share for the product. In my specific case, its Team System.
I have said in previous posts how much I love how open Microsoft has been concerning Team System. There have been tons of blog posts and webcasts. The product team members have really made an effort to present their knowledge to us. And we, the community, are very thankful for that. I would not be near as excited about Team System as I am now, if all of this information sharing hadn't occurred. I love the way the team members read the forums and newsgroups, and respond pretty quickly to problems presented there. I like how I can read someone's blog, leave a comment or send a quick note, and I get a response. Things like that convince me that there will be people around to help me with this product if I have issues, and that they will help me. Without this positive feedback, without this sense of "community" that this fosters, I would probably stick to VS2003, to what I know works, and would be a lot slower in adopting VS2005.
I'm starting to ramble, but I hope I have contributed to the one point I was trying to make: Community is important. To all the nay-sayers about community, I say this: Communities work. And they work well. And if there are people in Microsoft who do not think focusing resources on community is a worthwhile idea, I would love the chance to sit down and talk with them and try and set them straight. I feel that Team System is going to be a great success right out of the gate, specifically because of the work and effort that has gone into creating a vibrant community for it.