To be invited to become a team lead, you need to demonstrate your willingness to contribute to the broader community.  The user group owners will look at the following :

• Do you attend all the events.
• Do you actively participate at the events.
• Do you actively network at events, put people in touch with each other.
• Do you regularly respond to and post discussion forums.
• Do you write a blog regularly.
• Do you share your expertise on your own website, (if you have one).

You need to show your passion and enthusiasm for the community to be in the running for an invitation. 

Once you are invited, you will also need to perform duties.  You will more than likely already have a fulltime job, so you need to be aware that there may be a sizeable package of work you are going to have to do in your spare time – all the team leads at IW volunteer their time.  If events are held on Saturdays, you need to be there.

Some of the things we do in our community in Jhb are :

• Have minuted project meeting once a month which lasts around 2 hours.
• Decide agendas for the monthly events, present if necessary, source speakers and prizes, print relevant documentation for the attendees.
• Maintain the website – address access issues, add banners and calendar items, maintain the databases, change the look and feel, do backups etc.
• Monitor, contribute to and comment on discussion forums.
• Arrange SharePoint Lab Saturdays – source venue, sponsors, send invitations, host the day.
• Communicate to the community – we used to send newsletters but the process was too resource intensive, we are now going to create a News page on the site instead – source news items and update the page weekly.
• Find ways to continuously improve the events and attract new members.
• Respond to requests sent from the Contact Form on the website.
• Ongoing research on the industry to present best practices and technology to the community.
• Ongoing discussions with the team leads discussing management and future of the community.
• Have fun.

 It is quite a bit of work to run a big community like ours across different regions, but it rocks!! 

 

Seeing I have just been invited to moderate on LinkedIn, let me tell you what is involved in that space too.

 

Responding to discussion forums and contributing constructively to the group is the deciding factor.  Once you have been given management rights, you need to assist in managing the requests to join the group.  This entails going through each and every profile to ensure they adhere to the group acceptance criteria. 

 

It also entails keeping an eye on all the posts to ensure they adhere to the rules, and deleting threads and blocking repeat offenders when necessary.  Again, this is a time consuming process - don't accept an invitation to run a forum if you can't spare the time.

 

PLEASE NOTE!!
Becoming a team lead / helper DOES NOT mean you will become an MVP. Becoming and MVP DOES NOT mean you will become a team lead / helper. There is a big perception in the market that this is the case. It really is not. Your community work counts towards MVP of course, but team lead / helper is not a direct line into the MVP program. So make sure you want to be a team lead / helper for the right reasons.

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