Someone you should know

I’ve been involved with the .NET community for about four years now.  I existed on the fringe for some time, but it wasn’t until James Avery approached me about helping revitalize the .NET User group in the area that I really started to feel part of a larger community.  Actually, I don’t feel like the community in Cincinnati really started to take off until James and Jim put on the first Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp (which has evolved into the Central Ohio Day of .NET (CODODN)).

One of the great things about being a part of the community is meeting some really interesting and smart people.  Especially over the last year I feel like I’ve really gotten to meet some of the brightest minds in the community.  Some of these people speak at events and travel around to user groups.  Some of the people write books that we as professional developers read to increase our skills.  Still others of these people are simply event attendees or bloggers who I’ve come in contact with.  These people make up our community and I’m glad to be a part of that. 

At the devLINK conference this year there was an Open Space session where the topic of community was brought up.  The discussion wound down many rabbit holes but one of those holes really got to me:  the concept of RockStars.  There are many people in our community which are loud and energetic.  These are the people we see standing up to give technical presentations or organizing events.  These are the people that dominate (or at least seem to dominate) the Open Spaces and community discussions.  Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing.  On the contrary, every community has a group of leaders and recognizable figures and ours isn’t any different.  These are the people that in the community are known as the “RockStars”.

The thing is our community isn’t just made up of RockStars (I hate that term).  The community is made up of a great number of really intelligent developers who are passionate about technology.  Not everyone has the desire to stand up and yell their knowledge to the world at large.  Some just aren’t plugged into the community because they don’t know it exists or simply have other priorities that are in conflict with becoming overly involved.

I’d like to meet more of these people.  So, in order to help facilitate that I’ve decided to shine a spotlight on someone I think could be a great contributor to the community.  Not necessarily someone who speaks or blogs a great deal, but who is passionate about technology.  Someone I think could be a huge contributor to the community even if they play a small role.

Meet Brian Carter.  He’s a System’s Architect for a company in Louisville, KY.  Brian has done a lot of research and has even published some.  His blog is pretty new (I really like his theme), but has some good insights so I’d recommend subscribing.  You can also follow him on Twitter as brianscarter. 

I had the opportunity to meet Brian at an ArcReady event in December, and then again at the nPlus1 Winter Summit.  I think Brian has a lot to offer the community and I hope to get him up to one of the CinARC meetings to share his knowledge.

Call to Action -

I’d now like to ask each of you in the community to do the same thing I have done and introduce someone who think could make great contributions to the community.  Again, they don’t have to be someone with a huge online presence, an author, etc.  In fact, if they are that, then likely we already know who they are.  Please link back to this post so that readers of this post can follow all the new introductions.