I blogged earlier this week about the monthly giveaway we're doing for members of our community who contribute and give back to their fellow devs, and a little bit about our ongoing recognition program. In addition to looking at the discussion boards, we're also interested in taking into account other channels where members are active, engaged and contributing.

Today I'm calling out one of our most active members in the Chatter Dev Zone, Ed Schlesinger. Ed heads up an effort called studentforce.com that enables students and faculty of schools with Force.com capabilities, giving them the tools to solve the business and logistical problems they face daily, and solve problems the rest of us didn't know we had. The philosophy at studentforce.com seems to be that when we get technology into the hands of younger people, they will find revolutionary things to do with it. 

Ed himself has been in the Chatter Dev Zone posting ideas and articles for how Chatter and environments based on Force.com are going to enable the academic world – students, professors, and even the text book industry. It is a perspective that I certainly wouldn't have thought of, and underlines the point that the CDZ is an opportunity to cross pollinate across different industries and share ideas… so go over to the CDZ and start sharing your different perspective.

While I'm here I'll quickly recap a couple of developments in the CDZ: we installed two new apps this week, one from Ron Hess called Chatter Flow, a way to chronologically browse updates of people and objects in your universe. The other is called CraigsForce, an exchange for posting goods and services within your organization. Go play with them if you haven't already!

I'll wrap up with reiterating that our contributor program is going to be an ongoing effort. If you know someone who you think is a particularly great contributor, email me and let me know. Thus far we've had an emphasis on the discussion boards, but if you think another channel is particularly valuable also, then let me know — I'm definitely trying to get a 360 view of all the ways that our members contribute. Thanks, and have a great weekend!