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.
See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Jobs for a page like this that someone started on MediaWiki.org, and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Jobs for the reaction it got.
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.