We had several people complaining that Gangplank Hacknight’s did not have enough “hacking” going on. While it is true that Hacknights are very social there are still a lot of people doing hacking. However, we wanted to be sensitive to this and decided to offer a Super Happy Dev House. While attendance was a bit lower than we had hoped it was quite productive. Plus, about half the attendees were new to the community!
Brian Shaler did a fair amount of hacking on Eventification, a new tool to help stay up to date on what events are happening in Phoenix. Jade Meskill and myself had been talking about how the original hacknight website was very project focused. We liked the concept, but some how felt that really it should be about the people, not the projects. On a side note Chuck Reynolds has long been talking about a freelance directory. I have talked to him a few times about doing something to get that going. As a part of Phoenix Dev House we decided to throw together a quick and dirty list of creative people in phoenix. This directory for now requires a twitter account. It allows you to put your skills and interests in the form of tags. It is probably buggy and needs some love, but hey in the vein of DOING over saying… it was put together in a few hours at hacking event.
We hope that this allows for few things.
1. If you are looking for a skill set, you can quickly find someone that has it. (Chuck hopefully this will solve some of the needs of freelancers)
2. If you are looking for someone that shares your interests you can quickly get a list of those people.
ex1: looking for soccer buddies
“Anyone gonna watch the Gold Cup match tonight in Chandler/Mesa?” @bullybully32
ex2: looking for golf partners
“Any local #phx people play golf? Wanting to go play this upcoming week (or later) if anyone wants to. Been having the itch for weeks now.” @andrewryno
3. Allows you to get the pulse of the community at a glance or an idea about a person from their profile.
What we don’t see it as.
Any kind of replacement for a twitter client.
We will put up a user voice page pretty quick to gather feedback. We see this as a community project for the people of Phoenix. Next upcoming features… Integrated blog feeds via RSS and events attending via Eventification.
Please sign up (or claim your record) and update your skills and interests!
Looks cool, dude! Great work Derek, Jade, & Styles McHAML!
Fantastic idea. Last thing we need is more social media experts hanging around.
When the original hacknight site was created, we tried to give equal weight to projects and people, including a stream from Twitter of people talking about Gangplank or hacknight.
If there’s a separate site of just people, then consider mining the 100+ people that are on the hacknight site already for their Twitter handles. I think Jade has the info to get into that app/DB. If not, let me know and I can try to remember it…
BTW, the front page of the hacknight site seems to be down
Yeah we plan on migrating all people from old hacknight site as well as people from #phxdreamteam, we just didnt want to hold up releasing something. Part of the motivation was the old site being down. We are looking for a way to incorporate projects and companies potentially, but hope to do so in a way that keeps it people focused.
Could company and project info be entered into CrunchBase, associated to a Gangplanker and then pulled from that API?
Not sure yet if that would add effort or save effort
I think it may help if the tag cloud was sorted alphabetically. Currently, to find a tag you are looking for, you have to use CMD+F unless you really feel like searching for it by eye. So if you are looking for a Ruby developer, it would be easier to find.
Great idea though. Now if I want to find someone who wants to play golf, I’ll know where to look (assuming all the people that like golf put it as an interest).
Great start. In the future, I think a simple add on could be to also drop in our blog rss feeds. That way, there is also a streaming wall of all of our blog posts, too. Similar to Curtis’ idea, but a bit diff.
Bret,
Already on the feature list. We started down the road of adding it during Super Happy Dev House but had some last minute twitter limit issues that made us change strategy and we didnt get time to come back to rss feeds.. Shouldnt be too long I hope.
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Derek
this is great for me. new to area and meeting and getting to know people. thx