TechNet Wiki Community Council Spotlight: Five ways to energize and organize a technical community

Are you a community lead or SME and are you looking for ways to energize your community? Maybe you are new to a leadership role, or maybe you want to take the community to the next level. Do you consume and/or publish TechNet Wiki articles or blog posts? If not, one of the best ways to lead is by example.

 

Some things you may not know about the TechNet Wiki

There are thousands of articles on the TechNet Wiki and each month, the TechNet Wiki Ninjas compile a list of the top wiki articles. The best articles are published in a Guru Awards blog post. Quickly review the two previous links and you'll see that the worldwide TechNet Wiki community is very active and there are experts across many categories.

 

Five ways to foster community contributions:

  • Include a link and/or content from the monthly Guru Awards blog post in a recurring newsletter

  • Recognize community members that received a Guru Award or honorable mention.

  • Provide judges to assist with an existing Guru Awards category, or if there is not a category specific to your community, create a new category for the Guru Awards.

  • Encourage community members to publish articles (Ed Price has written some excellent articles about using the TechNet Wiki. These articles also provide ample content to include in newsletters)

  • Create a public facing blog for your internal community. Then, manage an authoring schedule with publishing assignments. See an example here. This is an excellent route to unite internal communities with external experts and MVPs.

 

Looking for some more ideas? Read my last blog post.