(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

• 94 blog posts


• 4 User Group/conference presentations (+1 lightning talk)


• Organized 11 User Group meetings


• Produced 6 Videos plus all the videos from the mysql user conference (available at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos


• Produced 14 Podcasts


• 2 Grants

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!

Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:

Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?

Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.

According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options. The transaction is expected to close in late Q3 or early Q4 of Sun’s fiscal 2008….. The deal is expected to be accretive to FY10 operating income on a GAAP basis.”

Now, there’s financial mumbo-jumbo in there, but basically what that means is in all likelihood, Monty actually has not received any real money yet. And with 20% of the sale being in options (not stock, just options, which means that there is the option to buy stock, so there’s nothing free there), that’s even less cold hard cash floating around.

But I present a challenge to MySQL employees who have derived tangible benefits from the sale to Sun: what percentage have you put back into the MySQL community, and how?

(and thinking outside the box is OK — time is money, so I am OK with you directly translating the number of hours you’ve worked on community projects into $$ given your approximate hourly salary).

For instance, Brian Aker’s list of software is impressive, and of the 28 projects explicitly listed (see “Project list” on the right-hand side, and I’d bet there’s more in the actual repository) I’d guess fewer than 5 were done on time paid for by anyone (much less MySQL/Sun).

I know that Giuseppe Maxia’s mysql sandbox is a project he works on during non-MySQL/Sun time.

But I’d love to see comments on what folks are doing, even without percentages of money and such, because I am willing to wager that most of the folks who work for MySQL give plenty back to the community on non-company time. My theory is based on the fact that most MySQLers that I’ve met do not see working at MySQL as “their job”, they see it as “I get paid to do what I love doing, and would do anyway.”

Recently I acquired Sesame Street Volume 1, and on the third DVD in the set I came across one of my favorite Sesame Street songs: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”

Here’s a sample of one such skit, if you are not familiar with it, or if you want a bit of nostalgia http://youtube.com/watch?v=B9lpUjQvToY (note, play will likely start automatically, so tune your volume appropriately before clicking).

The refrain is “Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day!” I live in a city of 34,000 people just 6 miles northwest of Boston, MA. I know exactly one neighbor, across the street, whom we met because I sent my husband over to get her live band to stop playing loud music at her party at 2 am. I do not know many of the local business owners. I do not know who lives in my neighborhood, yet people live around me. Saying I live in a “neighborhood” might be true, but I have no ties or links to it.

Calling a group of people with common interests “community” is just as meaningless as saying I live in a “neighborhood”. There has to be a bond there. I am proud to be a part of the MySQL Community, which actually has forged bonds. Much like Sesame Street, with dentists and bus drivers, our community has many different types of people in it.

In fact, I know that there are many who “only” read and perhaps comment. Remember that every single child (and adult!) that watches Sesame Street is a valuable part of the community — after all, a bus driver is useless without people to drive around. Similarly, folks who develop tools would be doing useless work if there was not such a need for these tools.

The MySQL Community is very real to me. If I were to “move away” from this community, I would experience a loss. There are so many folks whom I will be glad to see and spend time with at the upcoming MySQL Users Conference, and if they are not there, I will definitely miss them.

I blog about MySQL because I enjoy helping others. More importantly, I’ve enjoyed helping out the MySQL community a lot. I have been a part of other “communities” that did not have very much momentum and I was the only or one of the only contributors. I have also been a part of communities in which I’m mostly a lurker, or a learner, and while I gain a lot from it, I much rather prefer a more balanced give-and-take (that’s just my personality).

Speaking of personality, I’m human, as is everyone whose blog feeds to Planet MySQL (organizations excluded). This means that when folks e-mail me or find me in person and say “I love your podcast!” and “Your blogging really helped me.” and “Thank you for all you do,” I feel really good about myself.

If you are new to the MySQL community, feel free to come up and talk to me (or anyone, really) — during the conference, or otherwise. Even if you feel you have nothing to say, just say hello.

And I must end with a disclaimer: I won last year’s “Community Advocate” award from MySQL, so I guess all in all, I’m still a community advocate. Long live the dolphin!