New to Me: Developer Community Champions

Just stumbled upon this one after reading a post by Joe Stagner:

My team ( The Microsoft Developer Community Champions ) changes the content for our events every eight to twelve weeks. We have a marketing guru on our team, Amy Babson (one of the few marketing people who really rock), and Amy evaluates all kinds of statistics about developer event attendance and feedback.

My first thought - Microsoft Developer Community Champions? Huh? Who the heck are they? At first glance, it would appear to be a new name for something that's been around for some time. I mean, I remember attending a lot of Microsoft seminars in the DC area in the late 90's before coming out to Redmond.

 

Looking at the site for the Mid-Atlantic region, I see that Geoff Snowman is the DCC for that region. Cool. Geoff and I both worked for Spectrum Technologies, which was later absorbed by Ciber. After perusing Geoff's blog, .NET Banana [subscribed], it would appear that it's the same kind of thing as before - but better and perhaps more effective. I'm happy to see that Geoff has links to the WinProTeam user groups.