BANG! The members of EMC Elect 2014 are officially announced! This is the second year of the EMC Elect, a recognition program started in 2013 for those people sharing (technical) expertise and evangelizing about EMC products and solutions. Since it’s an annual program, being a member of EMC Elect 2013 does not guarantee membership of the EMC Elect 2014. Read on to learn a bit more about the nomination process, the assessing/judging of the nominees, who can call him/herself EMC Elect for 2014 and what’s on the agenda.

Applying for EMC Elect

Entering the program is pretty straightforward: this is a community program so you need to be nominated! If this puts you off straight away: do not despair, self nominations are accepted! The nomination period ran from EMC World 2013 to the 15th of November 2013, so that gave everyone plenty of opportunity to sign up.

At the end of the nomination period every nominee received a nomination acceptance form. With this form the nominee can supply the judges with the required social media contact information to judge them. This is a social program after all. Four distinct social media were considered:

• Twitter
• Blogging
• ECN (EMC Community Network)
• Speaking engagements (not necessarily EMC-only events)

A whopping 375 nominations came in which eventually distilled to 152 unique nominees whom also accepted and supplied their information.

Judging the EMC Elect 2014

A member of the EMC Elect is an active member, sharing knowledge and enthousiasm about EMC products and solutions via social media and/or real life engagements. Think blog posts, tweets, helping EMC users with their problems on ECN, speaking about EMC products and solutions during seminars like EMC World or EMC Forum, Cisco Live, VMUG, etc. Both quantity and quality are judged: going on a twitter frenzy with hashtag #EMC doesn’t guarantee entry if you’ve got nothing to add.

From last years EMC Elect 2013 nine members were selected to become judge for the EMC Elect 2014. I am honored to be part of those nine judges, alongside with (in no particular order) Roy Mikes, Lauren Malhoit, Brian Carpenter, Cody Hosterman, Lee Dallas, Alexander Almeida, Nick Fritsch and Shawn Cannon. Elect program oversight was provided by Mark Browne and Sean Thulin.

It was the task of us judges to take the list of 152 nominees and “elect” the 80 new members for EMC Elect 2014. This immediately led to the first problem: how will we as judges ensure that we all assess a nominee in an identical and correct manner? A couple of G+ Hangouts with all judges and the program leads later we ended up with a pretty spreadsheet. Every judge was assigned 16 nominees (Lauren got 17 😉 ) and we got to work. Digging through Twitter and ECN profiles, reading up on blogs, double checking speaking engagements, etc. A lot of work, especially if you want to stay consistent during the entire judging exercise. But definitely rewarding at the same time: I personally discovered a couple of gems of information on the internet, either in the form of good quality blog posts or a hyperactive twitter evangelist.

After the first pass, we did it all again but now we swapped nominees: I did a second pass on the nominees Lauren reviewed and Lee reviewed mine. This serves to balance out the judging: if I score someone a little to high and another judge doesn’t agree, he can downgrade the score (or the other way around).

Put the scores in order, take the top 71 scoring nominees, add the 9 judges and voila: you’ve got the EMC Elect 2014!

So now what?

First of all: the excitement of getting the list of all EMC Elect 2014 out in the open is incredibly rewarding. For posterity’s sake, here’s the full list: