> > I'm aware of a potential opportunity for a consultant with experience > > in free software and open standards > > > Does anyone have suggestions on how to find this kind of consultant? > > Is there a well known place where FSB consultants and potential clients > > meet? > > Possible starting points: > http://www.gnu.org/prep/service.html > http://www.debian.org/consultants/ If you're looking for someone familiar with a particular project, a google search on consultants site:<canonical.site> should yield something useful for most major open source projects; e.g. with site:netbsd.org you'll find http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/consultants.html close to the top. Your best bet is to be connected enough to the community to be able to find good people via an "I know someone who knows someone" chain. If you're not that well connected, you can still try local community resources. For example, it seems likely the Greater Seattle Linux Users Group (gslug.org) would have an appropriate mailing list. I personally know one guy in the Seattle area who might be useful, depending on the exact nature of the work; I'll send his contact info in private mail. Is there an FSB opportunity lurking here? I'd like to think so, but I don't. It would take a lot of work to maintain a broadly useful open source consultants' directory, and I don't think there's a workable revenue model for it. I seem to recall several variations on the theme during the bubble, but I doubt any of them still exist. The problem is trust: at one point late in the bubble I realized that if I'd gotten a headhunter's fee every time one of my friends took a job I'd told them about, I'd be ahead $100k or so --- but conversely, if I were trying to make money off of it, none of the people involved would have trusted me in the first place. I don't believe you can commercialize such a delicate web of trust without destroying it. ---Alex Carl Alexander KD7GUR ------------- MIT xela AT mit.edu Course VI (sometime special student) SIPB Mitgaard ("honorary mold") MITSFS http://www.mit.edu/~xela ------------- Work carl AT terc.edu Sr. Systems & Network Administrator, TERC http://www.terc.edu