7. Virtual Talent Pool

[JakeCarpenter]

- I saw this episode of Foundation with Philip Rosendale (
http://revision3.com/foundation/philiprosedale ) about the coffee shop
he's setup in SF as an experiment. Basically people can come into the
space and work for free in exchange for participating with the
community. When you arrive you basically check in and some information
about you and your skills appears on a screen. This way someone can
walk in with a need, glace at the screen to see if someone is there
who can help them and then approach that person. While writing this I
see he's extended it to a website called http://www.coffeeandpower.com/
but it seems to be attracting somewhat mundane tasks.

I think it would be great if we could foster a community where
people with real specific "serious" skills (graphic designers,
programmers, people who know electronics, people who know CAD software
and can help someone design parts for their project, people who can
write great copy for a site or brochure, etc) could hangout and
connect with each other to get work done. This was kinda done with
http://hnofficehours.com/ although it looks like that site may be
broken.

I invision someone signing up and listing their skills. When
they're logged in they show up on the active board (we'd obviously
need to add filtering based on skill etc since lots of people may use
the site and they can't all be displayed on one page). We could then
give users the ability to chat with each other as well as maybe have
"industry" rooms. It's basically the complete opposite of sites like
rent-a-coder or 99designs in that the person with a need approaches
people who have the skills. The site would also allow you to rate your
experience with people so that you could determine who is credible and
who isn't.

I can't find the article right now but I remember reading I
believe a blog post by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky about how badges
you earn for accomplishing achievements have this amazing power to
drive users to keep wanting more. This results in people using a site
more and more. We could possibly implement this to try and drive
interaction between users. Thoughts?

I love this idea. I can envision it as a turntable.fm design

^ That's funny. When I woke up this morning I was trying to think
of a better way of describing how I think the user interaction should
be and I thought something kinda like turtable.fm would be a good
example. Maybe not exactly with the characters standing around in a
room only because once about 30 people get in a room it's hard to find
anyone but glad we're on the same page.