I've debated this with people a few times and I tend to agree with Gail. Publishing a set of criteria (xx forum posts, yy blogs, zzz speaking engagements, etc) would lead a lot of people to "game" the award. As it is, I see some people that make an effort to earn the award with a year of hard work.

I think there's nothing wrong with that as the MVP is a yearly award, given for your community service over the last year. In practice that's hard to rank, and I think that overall the people running the award do an OK job. What's very interesting is that a few of my MVP admins from MS haven't been SQL people. So they don't necessarily judge my technical expertise, at least not themselves. They may get help, or may not (which might be good for me 🙂 ).

This is a Microsoft award, and I think they handle it pretty well. They get some community support and advocation for their products, those that do the work get some rewards from MS, but it's loosely coupled. You don't have to continue to provide support or work for MS, and they don't agree to give to xxx as an MVP. The awards change at a whim.

The one thing that I've heard suggested, which would be interesting, is that maybe we ought to limit the number of MVP awards you get. Either consecutively or in total, allowing more people to participate in the program. There are a lot of very qualified, very talented people that don't make the cut, sometimes because there are just some others that do more.