Community Credit Forums

I’d also adding a new prize for the most active newbie where you give out prizes to the most active new member in the months to encourage newbie’s.

I am not sure if this would be a necessary idea because many first time members that are very active end up winning something anyway just because of the merits of their contributions.  You are a perfect example of that.

Perhaps a variation of that idea would be to make point categories such as First time Speaker or First Time Blogger high so that newbies can be rewarded.  It would not be newbies to community credit, but newbies to the dev community in general.   This would encourage people to continue to contribute after they contribute for the very first time.  I think that passing that milestone of contributing for the very first time is one worth acknowleding/rewarding.

I think for first time speaker that might warrant extra points - having spoken to enough other speakers at code camps and user groups it has been my experience that for many people it's a lot of stress for them to get up there that first time....and after that a number of them are hooked on it :)

I've never been nervous except when I was a last minute replacement for Rocky Lhotka at a code camp when he got sick and they had me speak in his time slot....that was a little odd, walking in there and they are all expecting Rocky and they get me instead! Fortunately for me, once I explained (to probably the 3 people who didn't already know I wasn't Rocky) that I wasn't Rocky and I wasn't going to be talking about CSLA, only 2 people left the room to go to another presentation. The rest stayed to hear me talk about dynamic code analysis with Visual Studio 2005.