MySQL Community Member of the Year Award Musings

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and Rasmus Lerdorf won community awards, I thought to myself,

Next year I want to be on that stage, collecting that award.

Well, I did that and then some! (note that the image below is both of the awards, side by side, with no photoshopping).

But this post is not about me. This blog post is about you. More specifically, I am going to detail in this blog post the secrets to my success. This year, I thought to myself, “how can I make it so I am not on this stage receiving this award next year?”

So here is my challenge to you. I will open source my methods, and in return I will give $100 to each 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year (in whatever form they want, whether it’s US cash, a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate, a donation to an organization, whatever).

April 2006 – March 2007


  • 154 blog posts

  • 3 User Group/conference presentations

  • Organized 12 User Group meetings

  • Produced 2 Videos

  • Produced 11 Podcasts (started Nov. 2006)

  • 1 Grant

  • Google Summer of Code mentor– full disclosure, the $500 mentor incentive went directly to MySQL and helped pay for the new MySQL Forge servers, so my only payment was a T-shirt.

April 2007 – March 2008

Besides the above, other ideas for community involvement are:

  • Forum/list involvement

  • Volunteering for the Documentation team

  • Helping to organize user-based conferences
    • (my brain wants to call them UDC’s — “user defined conferences”).

I have only listed non-technical ways to win the award, and only what I could think of. The sky is the limit!

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and Rasmus Lerdorf won community awards, I thought to myself,

Next year I want to be on that stage, collecting that award.

Well, I did that and then some! (note that the image below is both of the awards, side by side, with no photoshopping).

But this post is not about me. This blog post is about you. More specifically, I am going to detail in this blog post the secrets to my success. This year, I thought to myself, “how can I make it so I am not on this stage receiving this award next year?”

So here is my challenge to you. I will open source my methods, and in return I will give $100 to each 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year (in whatever form they want, whether it’s US cash, a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate, a donation to an organization, whatever).

April 2006 – March 2007


  • 154 blog posts

  • 3 User Group/conference presentations

  • Organized 12 User Group meetings

  • Produced 2 Videos

  • Produced 11 Podcasts (started Nov. 2006)

  • 1 Grant

  • Google Summer of Code mentor– full disclosure, the $500 mentor incentive went directly to MySQL and helped pay for the new MySQL Forge servers, so my only payment was a T-shirt.

April 2007 – March 2008

Besides the above, other ideas for community involvement are:

  • Forum/list involvement

  • Volunteering for the Documentation team

  • Helping to organize user-based conferences
    • (my brain wants to call them UDC’s — “user defined conferences”).

I have only listed non-technical ways to win the award, and only what I could think of. The sky is the limit!