Thank you all for the great comments & feedback! Grouping all the replies into one
message:
If you're interested in giving it a shot, mail me
off-list - I'm looking for >= 3 or 4 devs
expressing an interest to determine if it's worth proceeding with creating this.
Off-list interest from 3 devs plus myself, so let's give it a shot.
Any interest in participating in a
MediaWikiDevsForHire.com ?
There were on-list and off-lists requests that the site be more general in 2 regards:
a) include pages for more roles than developers - including wiki consultants, and
commercial
support, as well possibly wiki gardeners, editors and designers.
b) include different wikis (Twiki, OddMuse, Confluence, MindShare, Socialtext, Jive,
WetPaint,
pbWiki, etc) as well as MediaWiki.
Given all that leaves is wikis + some form of work in exchange for payment, decided to go
with
http://WikiHR.net/ as the domain name.
The site is very simple - you choose the type of wiki system first, and then the type of
thing
you are looking for, and then you get a list of suitable matches. It's very sparse
currently,
but hopefully, being a wiki, people will help to fill in the blanks - and of course anyone
is
welcome to add themselves into the appropriate page, or update or add anything that they
think
is an improvement.
But I am not sure it works as a wiki.
Let's try it as a wiki initially, and if it doesn't work, it always can change to
a different
format. It seems to work okay for the twiki folks, but the only sure way to tell is to try
it.
I will however set it up so that anonymous editing is not allowed, and so that a validated
email
address is required to edit. Normally I strongly favour allowing anonymity, but you
probably don't want
people to be able to anonymously edit the list of people available for work or the
positions on offer,
and if you post an ad or indicate you're available for work then you really should be
contactable
... so hopefully these will be seen as reasonable requirements.
How about [[Category:Wikimedia developers for hire]]?
A single page to
send people to. You could make a subpage of your user page to show
your expertise, add it to the category, and remove it once you're
flooded with work.
I don't know about the "Wikimedia" in the category name, since it could be
misinterpreted as some
sort of endorsement by the WMF.
Here's how the Twiki folks handle this area:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/ConsultantsForHire
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/CodersForHire
... however,
Twiki.org is (I think) not hosted by a non-profit organisation, so their
situation
is simpler. Hosting it off-site is easy enough though, and avoids all these concerns.
There was a vague feeling that we shouldn't host
such a page at the official
site, as it might imply some kind of endorsement or recommendation, but a
brief list with links to off-site details and a big and obvious disclaimer
was considered acceptable.
I have made
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Jobs include such a disclaimer, have got rid of
most
of the content (it was pretty content-free anyway) and have added a link to
http://wikihr.net/ .
If we ran google ads, I might ask people who got work
to contribute towards
the cost of those (i.e. as long as the site costs are either neutral or negligible then
I'm happy -
I have seeded it with $50 for google ads on "mediawiki developers", and will try
that as an experiment.
If people find employees or medium or long-term work through the site, and think running
google ads
is useful, they're welcome to send me a few bucks towards this, or not, entirely
at their discretion. If the kitty runs out, then that's fine and just means the google
ads will stop
(but the site will of course stay up), so one way or another it should find equilibrium.
I think there is a very good opportunity for this, and
also for paid
support. Lack of support is a show stopper in some organizations (as
dumb as that is...). Is there a way this could be worked into the site
as well?
For sure - page added at
http://wikihr.net/MediaWiki_Commercial_Support , and someone
added their
company to this page yesterday.
-- All the best,
Nick.