The open source community is just that in many respects, a community.  There are many people interacting on a regular basis swapping work and ideas for a common purpose.  To resemble a true community however they need to borrow from the real world, there is a need for an open source Job Agency.

Job advertising is a major online business, millions of people change their professions and seek out new horizons all with the help of recruiters.  These recruiters are increasing their online presence, enabling people in Brisbane Australia to browse jobs in New York and vice versa, they also give quick responses for immediate needs and to give an easy environment for those keen for new work to find something that is uniquely suited for them.  This flexibility seems to help matching the right individual to the right employer.  Matching skills with opportunity is very important when there is real money involved in transactions, as the wrong mistake can prove to be very costly.

I ask then why there isn’t there a central location for people interested in moving from consumers of open source products to developing them?

I work full time as a BI Specialist, I also study full time for my Law degree.  I am very passionate about open source software, from PHP and MySQL to Apache and gcc I think they have much to offer and are amongst the best products on the market, free or not.  I have extensive knowledge of SQL, having installed it countless times, working with virtually every flavor under the sun and answering literally hundreds of questions about it in online forums.  I thought that I may be able to contribute to the community in a 4 week period that I was not studying.  I found that it was very hard to find tasks to accomplish, and to know who to contact.  Every different project has its own method of recruitment, its own contact pages and different ways of credentialing people.  These sites also do not necessarily have compartmentalized projects ready for someone to program, rather ideas and wishlists that may take forever to explore.  I see that finding the right person for those tasks, and organizing the project management structure will be a byproduct of having projects advertised for the willing in an online centralized location.

The current system adopted by the open source community seems similar to that of an apprentice, where they remain on the outside, watching and learning from the professionals, until it is time to hand over the tools and they eventually gain enough experience to be let loose on the real deal.  I do not think that this model is appropriate for the online and open source community that needs to be diverse, free thinking and getting the most out of their volunteers - and those wanting to volunteer.

Instead of having separate registrations for programmers at each individual project, there should be one place where I can go to find someone who needs my skills.  My proposed model is that there can be regular programmers assigned to a particular project, as it currently works.  These talented individuals should be able to include lists of things that they would like to be done, and an estimate on how they should be done and what skills would be required to bring them into reality and establish timeframes.  These lists could then be put into a central location where people could apply for the position or positions and demonstrate their skills, through references or samples of work - very similar to a modern job agency.  Some projects may require positions for project managers, testers, programmers, architects, dba’s, system architects, documenters or even trainers.

This model would allow people who have a knowledge of a particular specialty, for example file systems to be able to work in many projects where that specialty is called for, there does not seem to me to be any requirement that the same person who works with raw partitioning in mysql can not be working with postgres to achieve the same end.  This way the best person may be able to achieve the best result in the shortest periods of time, maximizing the output of the open source projects and the community as a whole.  This would also be a good avenue for people to refine their specialties or to gain knowledge in areas they did not previously have, both personally and professionally.

There are many very talented people who do not work in the open source arena who would like to help.  I evidenced this last week at a Microsoft conference, and have also seen a shift in programmers I have worked with who have microsoft specializations starting to embrace and consume open source products.  If there is an environment to gradually ease these people into contributing there would be an untapped wealth of individuals efforts that is currently just reading about what is happening on digg.

Another advantage of these systems is that people who are inspired with a very good idea for a project need not do all the coding themselves, of try to recruit friends and colleagues to do it for them.  If the idea has merit and is advertised in a place where people will appreciate them then there could be a workforce willing to lend a hand.  If you look at sourceforge, there sometimes are 30 similar projects, that have all been rejected before one individual has the management skills / spare time / resources to get the job done; mostly from their own effort.  If these failed startups had pooled their resources and ideas I think there would be better and more innovative products delivered to the market earlier.

I am more than happy to coordinate an effort to build the above system, as it is one of the things I see that a few knowledgeable people could do that would be a great injector of resources, ideas and fun into the open source world,