Hi,
DavidSilverlight:I guess my question would be what gives you the impression that it is aimed at .NET? I would love to get Ruby, PHP and folks from other technologies involved in our community, of course.
I think part of it may be the points categories. For example most of the events mentioned (such as TechED) are typically Microsoft and/or .NET orientated. It's similiar for the awards section which lists things such MVP awards from Microsoft or Code Project etc, again common Microsoft focused developer hang outs.
For a non .NET focused developer it could be easier to think the website isn't that friendly/orientated towards them.
Perhaps we need to find some people with experience in Perl, Python, Ruby.... you name it etc, to come up with some suggestions of similiar confrences and events in their developer communities for use as examples in the categories listing (this ties into my other suggestions about improving the category descriptions/selection process).
My only hunch would be that since I am a .NET guy and most of the folks I roll with are .NET developers, that the community is made up of .NET folks more than anything else. There must be something about the site that transmits a .NET vibe and I am not quite sure what it is.
That was definatly how I found out about the website. I found a link within someone's .NET based blog, and then explored the site to learn more about it and found numerious references to things familiar to .NET developers (such as TechED and Codecamps).
In another thread the subject of mentoring and learning different ways to contribute to/grow the community is being discussed. One option floated was for existing "standout" contributors to contibute short articles on such topics for www.community-credit.com's website.
Perhaps these two things could be combined. I am sure if one or two of these articles were written by someone in high standing within a non .NET focused developer community, and they promoted it via their blogs etc it would start attracting non .NET focused developers to the site. Even better if one or two of them go on to win prizes etc.
This might actually even be benifical for the .NET developer community, as it would start bringing together ideas on how different subsets of the developer community handle things such as community driven user events (code camps etc) differently. We might learn a thing or two from our Ruby friends etc.
Thanks,
Christopher Fairbairn