After we made sure the website was purchased and brought up successfully (as we saw in Episode 2); we sat together to come up with a general idea of how a website of a community should look like. I browsed the internet looking for people who have lived the same experience of building a community website; I couldn’t find a lot of resources. However, we thought of keeping it simple; so we agreed upon the main structure of the content of the web site. We knew that it should have forums and blogs for people’s interaction and collaboration. By that time I was flipping pages of my address book and my electronic contacts looking for a skilled developer to start building the web site but I couldn’t find somebody who meets the criteria I defined with myself. However my job nature requires that I route among customers; so I usually meet a lot of IT professionals and developers. While at a consultancy engagement at one of my customers I liked the simplicity of their internal & public website that I once described as neat!, So I asked around about the designer and the developer behind it, and that’s how I met Miss Rima Nakhala the head of development department.

I contacted Rima and asked her whether she is interested in community participation; and thankfully she responded with a positive answer and she started working on the web site. We didn’t know what is the software we should use for the web site; so she suggested DotNetNuke, and she started working on the development using this software, after sometime we had a community first meeting and we had a guest of honor Mr. Emad Abdelaziz the president of the community named XAMLIGHT who suggested using Microsoft Community Server instead of the DotNetNuke, we –with joy- accepted his suggestion and then he followed it with a generous offer to help Rima in the development of the website in case she happens to need help.

Rima worked on the website, and the website you are reading this article through was born! I would like to thank Rima for her continuous efforts to make this web site available all the time, also for her very remarkable response time to our endless requests and web customization.

I would like also to thank Mr. Emad Abdelaziz who has proved the benefit of cross-community collaboration by attending our meetings when he has time.

Another warrior of believe in community work is Mr. Majid Haj Ahmad, our soldier in the eastern province who has enriched this community by his wise and well planned suggestions and visions. Majid has helped this community on-line launch by acting like an outside watcher to constructively criticize and audit all the steps taken. I would like to thank him for believing the community work concept.

I’m not sure, if I’m going to write another episode about the foundation of VirManSec, if I don’t; it means that I –along- with the all the VirManSec members are working on hardening and developing the VirManSec Solid foundation.