Well, as you sort of described, I have worldwide responsibility for the MVP programme, and also how we think about community support for Microsoft.It’s great to sit in a Starbucks in Seattle – we could have picked almost any block in Seattle and happily found two or three.

Well, the summit’s really the official way every year for a face to face way to say thank you. The MVP programme started about twelve years ago as our way to say thanks for the amazing contributions that people make in the technical communities around the world, talking about our technology, authoring content, helping people get more value from our products by answering technical questions.

The summit provides a unique opportunity for us face to face to kind of sit down and reinforce that thank you each year but for me what’s great about the summit is that it’s sort of an ‘un-conference’. You know, lots of conferences you go to, you sit in a room and somebody presents to you Powerpoint, Powerpoint, Powerpoint ……, then some sort of discussion. That’s not a horrible thing - good learning can go on in that.

[laughs] There’s always an opportunity for learning in those environments, and networking.What I think is unique about the summit is it’s purely bi-directional, so for example on Wednesday we’ll have a mash up event, which’ll be the first Microsoft’s done a mash up event with external folks, and so I think that’s quite an exciting way for developer-minded people to get together and work collaboratively on projects that’ll end up on codeplex and be publicly available for sharing and living well after summit. We have sessions going on where MVPs are really turning the tables on us and they’re actually presenting to Microsoft people, telling us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. I think that’s quite exciting, that’s a different kind of event.

Yeah, one of the cool events going on is with the mobile devices area, for example. The mobile devices team, with the MVPs, been working over the last month or so to gather top issues that they want to debate at the summit, and they’re going to set up sessions where they all go off individually, putting together a list of priorities that they want to feed back to the product team, saying these are the most important things to work on. I think those kinds of things make this a different environment.

Absolutely. We started that idea at the last summit, where we actually had some of the Office MVPs present formally to the Office product team, telling them about the things that they liked and didn’t like. It was great session – lots of product group people showed up and they were able to participate and being on the receiving end of side of the feedback.

That’s right. The same sort of DNA, I guess it is, that causes people to get involved in community transcends to how they think about providing us feedback. It’s very clear to us that the voice that we hear from MVPs often represents two different kinds of feedback.

One is they’re Power Users of technology and so they’re able to vocalise some of the critical issues that they face using our products. But also, because they’re so engaged in the communities, they’re seeing common issues that people are broadly having with the product, and they can represent that feedback to us, so it’s a great opportunity and I think one of the unique attributes of the MVP summit is over the next three or four days we’ll have nearly as many Microsoft employees participate in the summit as we do MVPs. This says a lot, I think, about the product team’s perception of the value.

Yeah, and that’s one of the other exciting and unique things about the summit. We’ll have almost eighteen hundred attendees this year, that’s about 25% more than last year. By far our largest event ever, and representing almost ninety countries, with first time attendees from twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen different countries. We’ll have over five hundred technical sessions for the MVPs while they’re here.

That’s a really amazing collection of people, but I think what often surprises people about the summit is not just the geographic diversity, but also what I would call the role diversity. It sometimes surprises people that the MVP they’re sitting next to has a day job which isn’t as an IT pro or a developer – in fact, the person sitting next to them may be a cardiologist, or roofing contractor, or a tow truck driver, a jewellery designer.

These are all real examples of real MVPs here this week whose day jobs are not really about technology, but whose personal passions and hobbies take them into these communities and make them immensely valuable to others who want to learn about the technology.

It hasn’t really fundamentally changed from the beginning. In the beginning it was always about recognising contributions in the communities. But I guess what has changed is how we’ve defined what a community is. In the beginning most of the MVPs came out of the CompuServe forums. That’s where the programme got its start, largely with a big group of FoxPro passionate people.

The first decade or so of the programme was very focused on the newsgroups, and then about four or five years ago, when I joined the programme, we made some intentional changes. One of those changes was to say look, it’s not our job to define what community is for the MVP programme. Community is really anywhere users want to go and interact with other people to gain insights, whether it’s an offline user group, or a forum, or a blog or NNTP newsgroups.

The programme had to change and become what I call venue agnostic. I don’t really care where the discussion’s taking place, whether it’s on a Microsoft hosted site, a third party property site. What matters to me is acknowledging the value that those experts are brining to the conversation. That was one big change for us.

[laughs] So you’re a good example.

Maybe I should change that……

I think people inherently want to think about the mathematics behind these communities and all the conversations that are coming, and I think it makes it difficult for them to quantify sometimes those offline pieces, but the reality is different discussions happen face to face than happen online. I started blogging about a month ago in communitygrouptherapy.com.

One of the posts I did was about why I’m blogging, and whether or not corporations today are supporting employee blogging, which I think is an interesting topic. I think Microsoft has been very aggressive, and we’re extremely supportive of employee blogging, but there lots of issues with this. Some companies worry and say “Hey, this guy HAS a full time job.” I don’t have time for my person to be out blogging all day. In some ways my response to that as both a blogger and a participant in the communities, much like your user group example, is “What do I have to do that’s more valuable to me than blogging and having that conversation with other like minded people, getting different perspectives and different points of view.”

If you’re not doing that, then the answer to every forward looking question is based on the knowledge that you had that was probably internally gathered, so it really broadens your view and brings new insights to discussions.

I think there are a few things that always come to mind for me. One is probably my favourite area that I wrestle a lot with is this whole concept of third-party created or user generated content. I believe firmly that there’s more great content and answers about using Microsoft products beyond Microsoft.com managed properties than inside our properties.

MVPs are often times the authors of that content. But it’s also the community at large answering questions, and as much as I think that statement’s true in English, as I get beyond English it’s even more true that the great content’s in third party communities. So the question then becomes “How do we as a company do a better job of acknowledging all that content and answers, and delivering all that value back to our users as they come through our support experiences, whether they’re a consumer, or an IT pro, or a developer.”

So it then starts to make you think about technologies like tagging. For example, how you might think about tagging different kinds of services. I wonder, what would an MVP do if I gave them the ability to tag content that I would render via Search? Probably, they’d go tag all their own content. That’s not a bad thing, right? There’s great content there, and I could be more inclusive of that content and how we deliver value back to our customers.

Tagging’s a funny example, but it’s one I really like because I think at first people are very confused about tagging, and why would you tag, and why is this going to be better? And in some ways I think site specific tagging is only moderately interesting. I think the first impression most people have of tagging is it’s a just a different user interface experience. It’s a different way to nav instead of tabbed browsing, it’s a different way to drill through content. Where I think tagging becomes very powerful is where you start to tag multi-property. Things like delicious and what they’ve done sets a good model for how we think about extending our reach to all these third party pieces of content.

(laughing) Yeah, if my barbecue was a little bigger I might be able to accommodate almost two thousand people here, but I think my wife would kill me, so we’d probably be better to leave the barbecue for another trip.

My pleasure, thank you.