How to engage your user group - Inland Empire .NET Users' Group Most Valuable Members

How do you determine the most valuable members of your user group?

Statistically.

At duringlunch.com, James has posted a list of the most valuable members of the Inland Empire .NET Users' Group. Each member received points based upon "viving back to the community."

So what did the MVM, Volkan Uzun, do?

Volkan has been coming to the meetings for several years, working in several levels of the group, most recently developing and teaching a 12 week Beginner's ASP.NET course affiliated with the IEDOTNET, writing several blog postings per month, and recently received two Microsoft Certifications. He must stay up nights, thinking of new ways to give back to the development community.

Volkan has provided his own account of his experiences with the group:

James Johnson started the Inland Empire .NET user group 5 years ago. I started attending the user group like 2, 2.5 years ago. I watch this user group growing and becoming better every day. Good speakers, good pizza, nice location (hey no parking fee!!!), very friendly people, and really devoting president James....We had a 12 weeks Beginner's Asp.NET course, we recently completed it and i think it was a succesfull training. We opened our forums, i still dont understand why it didnt become popular to help people.

Then Volkan talked about the genesis of the award.

One year ago James started a program which will reward the members who helps back the community, called MVM program; and as you can see from the right corner of this blog, i am this year's winner. I literally got tons of stuf, but one of the best thing is this proves i could give it back to the community. When i started coming the user group, i was more likely a consumer. Now after some time, this shows to me that, i start paying back to the user group which still i owe a lot....

But Volkan isn't keeping all of his point-winning secrets to himself. He listed a number of ways in which people can help the group:

advertising the user group
help tearing down the meeting room
help setting up the room
find a speaker
speak yourself, give a presentation
bring more people
rsvp so we can now how much pizza we should buy
check the forums, help to the people

Read the rest of Volkan's post here. And James' information on the other award winners and participants is here.