New subject: Any interest in participating in aMediaWikiDevsForHire.com ?

4 Oct 2007


      Hi All,
I occasionally get enquiries from small-business people who want an extension or some 
custom functionality developed for their company's MediaWiki wiki. Somehow these
people end up finding me (god knows how) and ask me for help, or I see people enquiring
about this on IRC or very occasionally on this mailing list ... and it seems to me (as a
good capitalist) that there is a bit of a missed market-opportunity here.
So the current situation we have is:
* You are a dev, and want something built ---->  You go build it yourself, and scratch the itch.
* You are a for-profit company who use wikis a bit, and want something built as a one-off
  ---->  Currently, you're kinda screwed; good luck finding suitable people.
* You are an established company or non-profit whose core functionality involves wikis,
  and need things built/maintained on an ongoing basis ----> You employ full-time devs in the US / Poland / wherever.
It's that middle tier that I'm focusing on here. I'm wondering about establishing
a simple directory web site, that has a grid of developers who are interested in working
on one-off or short-term MediaWiki development work (i.e. where you don't give up your day-job
or studies, it's just a chance to earn a little bit of extra cash). Some fields to include
in the grid might be:
* Your name
* Whether you have SVN commit access (since often extensions either need a few new hooks, or
  might uncover latent bugs in the core code that need to checked back in, plus it's good
  all-round if new useful extensions end up in SVN)
* Whether you're interested in per-hour-work (and potentially your rate, if people want to
  include that - could even have different rates - e.g. us$x for GPL work that can checked
  into SVN, us$2x for non-GPL work that stays private).
* Whether you're interested in fixed-price work (personally, I wouldn't recommend this,
  but hey, you're independent people fully capable of making your own decisions)
* Whether you're interested in working for equity-only or mix of equity + cash.
* How to contact you (e.g. an email address, or web page, or phone number, or whatever)
* Possible payment methods (e.g. PayPal, bank transfer, etc)
* Country + timezone (people like to know where people they are dealing with are)
* Languages spoken
* Optionally, any areas you're particular interested in or skilled in, if people want to
  include this (e.g. if you're a CSS god, or good with database optimization, etc).
* _Maybe_ employers get to rate devs they have used, and this is shown, like eBay feedback??
  (not sure about this one though)
Then employers could contact devs directly, and pay devs directly (i.e. to be clear, what you earn is
what you earn - it's between you, the employer, and your local tax office, to send invoices /
pay tax / etc). 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 no interest in making money off of anyone else's labor, or getting involved in any of the 
legal or financial issues involved with employment).
Generally, I think this would be a positive thing for MediaWiki - it'd probably get some
bug fixes and new extensions into SVN, and it might mildly increase or ease MediaWiki adoption in
small companies, by knowing that development help is available. And obviously it could help devs
pay their bills and put food on the table by working with MediaWiki, which has got to be a good thing.
There are some negatives though - in particular, being paid introduces some perverse 
psychological effects, where people's strong inherent motivation to do a good job can be
overridden by the weak external motivation to only work in exchange for payment (i.e. you could
potentially end up with less development of the non-income-generating core stuff that benefits
everybody, and more development of the income-generating custom functionality that only
benefits a few people).
Overall though, I think the potential negatives are outweighed by the positives.
Anyway, enough background info. The question I have at this point is: Are any other devs interested in trying this?
Understand it's an experiment though. It might work, it might not. But even if it flops, the cost
of failure is essentially zero. And if it works, then great.
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.
Also, if you think it's a crappy idea, you are free to say so on-list (seriously - if enough
people say it won't work, then it saves me the effort of putting it up, so I'm happy). Or if
you think it could work, you're welcome to say so too. All comments and feedback are welcome.
-- All the best,
Nick.

Any interest in participating in a MediaWikiDevsForHire.com ?