Hi everyone

[Elias Bizannes]

This is an exciting project that I look forward to developing. It's a
simple idea, with a lot of the existing technologies already in place
- it just requires a bit of coordination to get people to implement
this.

So here is a summary

Objective: A means of allowing the Australian ICT (Information,
Communications, Technology) community to
a) Become aware of others in the community
b) Be able to discover expertise in the community
C) Be used to guage the activity of the Australian community

Proposal:
Through the use of open data format standards, with the
SiliconBeachAustralia.org domain as the coordinating server to create
consistency, to allow people to markup information about themselves on
their personal websites or anywhere they desire to host their data,
that will enable the discovery of who exists in the community, what
they can do, where they are located and when are they available for
future collaboration. This method is like us creating a distributed
database whereby anyone can query to generate understanding about
Aussie ICT.

Example of what the ideal outcome would be, would look like this:
- Person A can install a plugin that stores information about
themselves on their blog
- Person B can use a generator to perform a similar function, and
embed the core into an HTML page stored on their server
- Person C can use another third party service that participates, to
store the same data
- Regardless, through the use of open standards like microformats, we
can achieve data portability with the same outcome

- The information people store will include
i/ name
ii/ location
iii/ social network services
iv/ Specific skills, in accordance with an ontology controlled from
the siliconbeachaustralia.org domain
v/ Companies that have worked at or are currently working at

- Once setup, analytics can be performed on the Australian industry.
For example, people can query this distributed database to ask things
like
"Who exists in Adelaide". Why? So we can organise local events and
know who to contact
"Who is a IP lawyer with expertise in Belarus". Why? People we
effectively have a industry specific 'yellow pages' of skills
"How many start-ups are there in Perth?" Why? Because we can create a
way of measuring startup activity which can be used for a variety of
things helping everyone from journalists, policy makers, investors, or
even new graduates looking for a job
"A list of all startups in Australia". Actually for the first time,
allow us to fully understand what businesses exist.

Of course, over time we could make this 'database' more sophisticated
to anything what the siliconbeach community deems useful. But if we
start small - with simple things like names, locations, employers,
investments - we already have a very useful thing.

Thoughts?

[Elias Bizannes]

From the user side:
- hResume wordpress plugin: http://hresume.weblogswork.com/?page_id=3
- hResume generator, hosted on the siliconbeach.org domain:
http://hresume.weblogswork.com/hresumecreator/
- ...or a third party service that supports the hResume microformat:
http://www.emurse.com/

Pingbacks to notify the SBA.org server for updates

as for the aggregation side...?

[Elias Bizannes]

...and a plugin to pull infor from LinkedIn http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/linkedin-hresume/

[Phil Wolff]

Please feel free to be bold and ignore these few why-it-can't/
shouldn't-be-done thoughts.

I'm an alumnus of the world's largest staffing company (hiring more
than three million people yearly). I learned...

- Hiring is usually about rapport, reputation, relationships,
availability, and almost nothing about paper qualifications.

- People hate writing about themselves like advertising copy editors
for a box of detergent.

- People procrastinate.

- Great people rarely do resumes. (professional bios, maybe). They
build reputations through private experiences and online media (like
blogs, listservs, forums).

- Resumes are wrong. Most people update them every ~4 years, so they
are stale 98% of the time. Also, since they are an advertising item,
missing, misleading, or unintelligible data is so common that HR
departments pay fortunes to fact-check CVs before interviewing
people.

- Staffing pros hate resumes. They don't fit into their corporate
databases, they don't trust them, and they rarely tell them what they
want to know. Even data structured in a variant of HR-XML solves a
little bit of rekeying, but doesn't address the relevance and
freshness problems. I went to a staffing IT conference and,
universally, resumes look like spam to HR departments. Think of your
gmail spam folder. They buy software to screen resumes out of email
and dump them into huge databases which they never check.

- The IT tools you used for your last job search are unlikely to be
the same ones as your next job search. 3-5 years is an eternity in
internet time, and sites/practices which are hot and useful for
finding work now won't be the same. People flock to new, more useful
strategies for finding talent/jobs. Systems you build now have very
short shelf lives.

- Niche services rarely work unless the market demands domain
expertise . For example, there's a great job board for surgical
nurses. There are only 20k of them in the whole world, they ask very
detailed questions about licensing and which procedures they
performed. That site can survive against nearly five hundred medical
job boards, all the generic services (Monster, HotJobs), and the even
more generic services (Craigslist, LinkedIn, add-a-job-board-to-your-
blog).

- Semantics suck. Do you know how many resumes just say "accounting"
or "C#" as what a person knows? Or how many phrases can be used to
describe auditing? And that no two people mean exactly the same thing
when they write it down?

Questions...

- While f2f and collocation improves effectiveness, knowledge workers
are in a very flat, computer mediated economy. Look at oDesk and rent-
a-coder for a sense of the global market in IT free-agency. How are
Australians different? What labor market problem are you solving that
is not solvable using existing services?

- If you are making a decentralized talentbase, why would you limit
the membership to Australians? People flock to the biggest, freshest,
easiest to use, funfilled, attractive, trustworthy, effective talent
pools.

- Why not jump into an existing pool/service instead of building your
own walled garden? e.g. Brazilians didn't build their own social
network, they moved into Orkut.

- Phil

[Warren Seen]

Phil.

I hear what you're saying about resumes - for the most part I agree.

Don't get too hung up on the "resume" aspect though - I initially
mentioned hResume simply because it ticks most of the boxes that
Elias listed as criteria for a microformat - it doesn't have to be a
"resume" in the conventional sense, it just has to adhere to the
hResume format, which a professional bio page certainly can do if
marked up correctly. This has the happy side-effect of allowing us to
pull in data from people's LinkedIn or emurse profiles - so we really
aren't building our own walled garden at all.

The idea as far as I see it is instead to index across these sites,
as well as let people throw their data on their own blog/site through
a plugin. Let us be the Summize to their Twitter, etc. Certainly
there is no reason it should be restricted to Australia, but in the
first instance, it makes a useful testbed. "Scratch our own itch" and
all that....

Correct me if I'm wrong Elias, but I don't think the main focus was
ever on hiring/recruiting, was it? I thought the idea was simply to
aggregate the knowledge of "who's here in AU, and what are they
doing?" into a central place, to facilitate those f2f connections and
let whatever happens then, happen.

While the job market may be global, the meetup "market" is *very*
local, and as we're finding out, *very* fragmented, and that's the
market i think we're interested in.

Cheers,

Warren.

[Wayne Meissner]

On Aug 6, 3:46 am, Phil Wolff <pwo...@gmail.com> wrote:

[cutting hard to just highlight a few points]

> - Staffing pros hate resumes.

> - If you are making a decentralized talentbase, why would you limit
> the membership to Australians?

You seem to have somewhat missed the point. The SBA database isn't a
service for staffing people or corporates looking for staff.

The SBA database is for SBA members to connect with other SBA members
physically close to them who might have the skills they need.

I also hope it will partially to stop people from saying "but
Australia has no talented {programmers, managers, accountants, * }" -
hey here is a database with a buttload of those people.

With that in mind, it makes no sense to make it a general service for
everyone - people searching for SBA people will just have to apply
more filters. And given the DB will be decentralized, there is
nothing to stop someone else from using the information in a generic
DB if they want.

Whilst I agree that resumes aren't perfect, having something imperfect
that works right now is better than a perfect concept that doesn't
exist.

[Elias Bizannes]

Just to clarify, this isn't about hiring. My theory about how we build
a strong community in Australia is by
1) Identifying the dots on the map. You are limited by the things you
didn't know that you didn't know
2) Building links with those dots. The strength of a social network is
based on the connections between these dots.

For me, this initiative is about identifying dots - pure and simple.
Who exists in the Australian community (note: you don't need to live
in Australia nor be a citizen), what skills do they have. Of course,
it lends better opportunities like a real time analysis of activity in
the Australian community (how many startups are active as of August
2008), but as a first step, let's keep it simple.

Phil - your words are always appreciated. I hope however this gives
clarity on why we are doing this. Identifying people and identifying
skills - with a more granular view oas time progresses (ie,
"accounting" develops into a master type with 500 sub types like
"Developing KPI's")

[Myles Eftos]

Just thinking out loud, well probably need to add the geo microformat to the
mix as well, so we can get the location data easily.

----------------------------------------------
Myles Eftos
Mobile: +61-409-293-183

MadPilot Productions
URL: http://www.madpilot.com.au
Phone: +618-6424-8234
Fax: +618-9467-6289

Try our time tracking system: 88 Miles!
http://www.88miles.net

[Phil Wolff]

Thanks for tolerating the rant.