It was nice to work through my email and find a bit of positive news instead of more work! I’m in for another year it seems, and was great to see both Brent and Jeremiah make it onto MVP Island without booting me off. I did about the same amount of community work as the year before, still sticking to my plan of doing the things that either make sense for work or that I just want to do.

As I look back at one year as an MVP (and I don’t claim to be typical), I’ll share some thoughts:

• I still wish the selection was more transparent
• As a trainer I can’t say that being an MVP has made a lot of difference, but that may just be bad marketing on my part. Some people are thrilled by the acronym, more often they don’t know
• The MVP Summit was a good networking opportunity if you ever get a chance to go. I’d like to go in 2010, but I’m going to have to balance that with my overall desire to travel less. Do this or a SQLSat? Hard choice for me.
• I think it’s more interesting to those that want to influence future product changes and/or write a book, etc. It’s not that I’m not interested in features, but my work tends to keep me about 1/2 version back or more – that’s the stuff that people want to be taught.
• No pressure from MS to say/do anything in order to keep the MVP. They provide a lot of opportunities to talk to various teams for NDA type discussions, but that’s a carrot. No stick that I’ve seen.
• More than anything it’s been useful as part of being on the PASS Board so that I can see what goes on in both communities. A very specific niche I know, but the one that convinced me to re-apply instead of making room for someone else.

My only plan for year two is to nominate more people for MVP. I’ve put two in so far and I’m going to try to find at least one person a month. I’ll look for people that are doing good work and have good character, and let the MVP team figure it out from there.