I'd like to expand on Grant's ideas here, and suggest that local open source workers could benefit from more communication, perhaps the formation of a guild and from considering more seriously the role of certification. This is a semi-structured food for thought, a bunch of open questions many of which has done the rounds over the years. Perhaps given the current state of the industry its a good time to rethink them.
Grant suggests a service for finding jobs and workers and rating the work done. A third problem to address (also mentioned in this thread) is reliability for ongoing maintenance -- customers want to know that someone will be able to maintain their systems if the person who installed them drops out of the picture for some reason. There are plenty of people doing "open source solutions" on this list, but apart from tech talk here, how much communication is there? how much sharing of jobs and resources is actually going on? what kind of ongoing guarantees is this portion of the industry giving its customers? How about if the services below were bound up in some kind of guild of open source solutions providers, such that there could be an implicit guarantee that there are plenty of people around to fix and maintain a business' systems? Certifications provice a similar guarantee -- businesses know that there are plenty of MCSEs around to maintain the state of their Microsoft systems. However (perhaps because of hacker arrogance) there has been very little uptake of Linux certifications here. Is this damaging to the local open source industry as a whole? How many of you are members of the LPI (Linux Professional Institute) or have such a certification? Is it feasible to have standard practices in this industry? is it feasible that one random consultant could take over systems installed by another? This is possible with Microsoft systems, and I'd guess that from a business' point of view, a Microsoft system running at 95% reliability ongoing is more sensible than a Linux system running at 99.999% reliability for the next few months. However if a similar implicit guarantee of ongoing maintenance were possible for the Linux systems, they would be the preferred choice. A common concern about the use of open source (eg. in UK recommendation http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/interoperability/egif_document.asp?docnum=430) is that there is no single [global] solutions provider. I'd argue that with open source systems there is no need for such a single vendor, much as there is no need for a single provider of plumbing or electrical installation -- as long as you use standard pipes and wires, the job can be taken over by another tradesperson, and there are generally plenty of local tradespeople available for any site. With standard systems software perhaps we can make similar implicit guarantees. Is this unreasonable? Am I ignoring the hard customisation involved in every install of systems software, or is it reasonable that any certified Linux admin should be trusted to reconfigure a running server? Is that what businesses want and is that what the open source industry is actually delivering? would different structuring or different attitudes achieve that goal? Conrad. On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 09:59:14PM +1100, Grant Parnell wrote: > Thought of something else on the way home, here it is in point form:- > > * co-op website with linux 'service' organisations > * linux workers can login & create a skills/location profile > (perhaps an ABN with a password?) > * people wanting work done can create a job profile > { by job I mean a one off project of a few hours or days maybe } > * either party can look for jobs/workers > * when the job is complete the requestor fills out a brief satisfaction > survey (quality, price, timing) > * worker can counter review the customers remarks > * people can see the results of previous work > * should be pretty much automated to avoid bias > * various sorting options > * optionally put your rates online > * If enough business comes out of it maybe employ someone to answer to a > phone/fax number and basically use the website on the client's behalf (or > perhaps the workers too?) > > This is meant to address 2 problems, a) customers & workers finding each > other and b) how to decide who's worth their salt. > > Problems - > > head hunters - why should they get a cut for using the site.. > Alternately, maybe they should fund it? > > Funding - it's going to cost *something* to setup & run, maybe that could > be absorbed by a few of us with vested interest, consider it part of your > 'advertising' budget. > > -- > ---<GRiP>--- > Web: www.arcadia.au.com/gripz > Phone/fax: 02 4950 1194 > Mobile: 0408 686 201 > > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
