Mike Briggs: The Best Community Builder of All Time

I have had the privilege of knowing Mike Briggs, Principal Field Technologist for Sun Microsystems for about 20 years.   I have never met or heard of anyone that is better than Mike Briggs in terms of building global technical communities on the web.  Far and away the most popular site at Sun Microsystems is onestop.   The name  onestop says it all.  The idea was/is that onestop is the only place you need to go to find technical information on a piece of hardware, software or any technology.

As anyone who has tried to created a global technical community knows, it is easy to have grand goals when starting a global community, then reality sets in.  The reality is that it is extremely hard to create a successful technical community for a variety of reasons.  Mike is very unique in that he has the ability to pull individuals together for a common cause, create the right balance between consistency and freedom, put in a governance mechanism that is very balanced all while having the technical ability to write whatever needs to be created to keep improving the site/experience.

Mike has recently taken on the very important challenge of making Sun's Partners part of onestop   This is very important to Sun's future.

If/when the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems goes through, IMHO, there is no one more important to make sure that transition goes smoothly than Mike Briggs.  Mike is a great guy and it should be pointed out that Mike was personally recruited by Scott McNealy to work at Sun.