Guidance is harvested from experience and matured through dialog. An essential component for projects in p&p is our advisory boards. We value diversity in our boards, which include both Microsoft employees and members from the community at large. We like subject matter experts and passionate novices. We want advisors that can represent common interests across a wide variety of industries.
Advisors help us to set priorities for the project. They provide real-time feedback about the guidance we are creating. We also benefit when our advisors engage their respective communities about the project in order to collect an even broader set of feedback. Our ultimate goal is produce practical guidance for real world development problems.
One critical contribution is helping us to identify the most common challenges that engineering teams face when building IoT solutions.
Every other week, we host an online meeting that lasts about an hour. During this meeting, we demonstrate what we’ve done since the last meeting. We discuss how we did the work and why we did it. We solicit feedback during these meetings and we encourage a critical (though friendly) evaluation of everything we do.
We also ask our advisors to examine our work in between these regular meetings. This involves reviewing the code and commenting on content. It helps the meetings to be more productive.
Our advisory board is voluntary. However, it’s a great place to share experiences and learn from others. It’s also a good way to meet other people who are passionate and thoughtful.
We make it a point to acknowledge each of our contributing advisors when the guidance is published. Also, former advisors have expressed personal value in showing their involvement in helping Microsoft shape guidance in a specific area.
First, an advisor needs to care about the Internet of Things and related topics. Secondly, they need to be willing to participate in the feedback process. With respect to technical knowledge, both real world experience or the need to be successful in the near future are good qualities to bring to the table.
If you have not done so, please review the readme file for this project first.
Send an email to mspnp@microsoft.com, including:
- IoT Journey on the subject line
- Short description of your experiences building an IoT solution.
- Short description of your goals related to IoT.
- Any places where you share with a community; such as a blog, twitter, etc.