Council Spotlight - TechNet community recognition awards and other project updates. New teams! Wiki Top Contributors Awards, TechNet Guru Awards, TechNet Ninja Belt Awards and the future!!!!

The weekly Top Contributors Awards, monthly TechNet Guru Awards and [soon to be monthly, or even bi-weekly] TechNet Ninja Belt Calculator are three projects I am very proud to have conceived, nurtured and been a part of for many years now.

Over the years, I have automated these as much as possible, culminating in the Wiki Council Dojo, which we use to collect all these statistics, and the Ninja Belt Calculator that uses many metrics, including stats from all these incentives. But they are still high maintenance.

My lively and captivating new MVP circles and most exciting personal and professional adventures in IoT mean I cannot maintain these projects as much as I would like.

 

So for the last six months, I have spend many a night and weekend reshaping some of the tools behind these projects. Updating for easier use, plus copying much of the functionality up to the Dojo (management website), for others in our team to now use.

 

Some of these projects began as a fun night's coding. Several years later, that code starts to break, or is outdated for migration to a web app. Some of my tools have to manually crawl web pages, and pages often change, so crawlers break.

Now that much of this is in the Dojo, I have been able to reach out to some of my community companions for assistance.

In recent months, we now have several well known Wiki ninjas helping spread the work.

 

Firstly, Peter Geelen now closes the monthly Guru submissions page, and posts the new one.

Carsten Siemens has been scanning our monthly submissions for plagiarism for many years now and works with Peter Geelen to keep the competition clean and fair.

Also in recent months, Ronen Ariely has also been incredibly helpful, across many of these projects. Ronen also pushed for more MVPs to join the Guru Judging teams for each category. The result is a much better quality of article appraisal and higher quality judge comments, back to the competitors.

Most recently Kamlesh Kumar has stepped up and taken the job of selecting and publishing the winner blog for Top Contributors. I still run the crawler every week to collate the changes, but I hope to move that to the cloud this year too. Kamlesh has also taken on the task of keeping the Dojo up to date, so that he can also run and blog the results from the Wiki Ninja Belt calculator.

Finally, other helpful TNW community members, who deserve a mention for recent help with these projects are Syed Shanu, Richard Mueller, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Hezequias Vasconcelos, and of course the Wiki's big daddy, Ed Price.

 

Amongst the many changes lately, the Dojo and its various satellite sites have had some major fixes and enhancements.

It also looks like I have finally squashed all of the bugs (new and old), from migrating the Guru Vote tool to a new multi-browser HTML version.

I have recently produced several [internal team only] how-to videos. These will hopefully endow all future helpers with the knowledge needed to continue the good work of these blogs, and to keep the wheels of the Dojo and Ninja Belt Calculator turning! :)

 

Thanks to everyone, who has helped us get to where we are today.

I am excited at the possibilities and plans we have for 2017 and onwards!

I should now have some space to enhance the existing competitions, with new features fans have been asking for.

I should also have some real world prizes and recognitions coming this year.

So if you engage in any of these incentives, keep up the scores and you may be surprised!  ;D

 

Recently, Ed very kindly called me the wind in the community's sails.

I'd like to extend that compliment to all of those above, who help keep these projects running, relevant, fair and worthy!

 

Thanks also, to YOU of course, for reading our blogs!  :D

We are very grateful for your readership and support.

 

Pete Laker (Azure MVP)

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Super!Thanks to everybody who make this great community possible!long live TNWIKI :)
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Thank you Pete and Ed for giving me this opportunity to work with you legends :) , and special thanks to our readers who appreciate every time with nice comments and feedback (Y) . Thanks to all other contributors and team members who works very hard to provide the best blog post to techie world. And thanks to Microsoft for this nice platform where anyone can learn and boost their knowledge. :)
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2017
    The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Thank You Peter for developing and keep on updating projects to make our TechNet wiki Community in a more better way.Thank you all for your support and work.Let's all together always make our TechNet Wiki a great Community.
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Awesome work ...making TechNet wiki community rocking.
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Super blog post Pete and thanks for your great contributions. Cheers All for the excellent team work!
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2017
  Ya! It's Awesome :)
• Anonymous
  March 03, 2017
  Thank you Pete for your contribution! Super !
• Anonymous
  March 03, 2017
  Thank you guys for all your work!
• Anonymous
  March 05, 2017
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 21, 2017
  It's so awesome to have the community come together to make these projects happen!
• Anonymous
  March 21, 2017
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 23, 2017
  Looking forward to the new features - hopefully they include new and more well defined categories