Guidance is harvested from experience and matured through dialog. An essential component for projects in p&p is our advisory boards. We prefer 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 independent consultants and drivers from large enterprise teams across a wide variety of industries.

What does the project hope to gain from an advisory board?

The advisory board is a representative body for the community of developers interested in the CQRS and ES. They help us to set priorities for the project and they provide real-time feedback about the reference implementation we are creating.

We also benefit when our advisors engage their respective communities about the project in order to collect a broad set of feedback. Our ultimate goal is produce practical guidance for real world development problems.

How much time will advisors spend on our project?

Formally, we have a meeting every other week. The conference call (with screen sharing) lasts an hour. In some sense, this meeting is our sprint review meeting. In it, we demonstrate what we’ve done since the last meeting as well as how 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 encourage our advisors to examine our work in between the formal meetings. This involves reviewing the code and commenting on content. This helps the meetings to be more productive.

What do the advisors get out of it?

Our advisory board is voluntary. However, it’s a great place to talk about CQRS, ES, DDD experiences. It’s also a good way to meet other people who are passionate and thoughtful. Our goal is to improve the state of our art and our advisors are a significant part of that effort.

When the project is released, it is posted on MSDN and we make it a point to thank each of our contributing advisors. Also, former advisors have expressed personal value in showing their involvement in helping Microsoft shape guidance in a specific area. We also send free copies of the published books and invite advisors to the p&p symposia.

What are the qualifications for being an advisor?

First, an advisor needs to care about CQRS, ES, DDD 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.

I’d like to be an advisor on this project, what do I do?

Send an email to the project leader, Grigori Melnik at grigori dot melnik at microsoft dot com and let us know the following:

1. What is your connection to CQRS, ES, DDD?
2. What experiences do you have or hope to have with CQRS, ES, DDD?
3. Any places where you share with a community; such as a blog, twitter, etc.