Building a pool of contractors for development

[hamogu]

Some NumFOCUS projects have done open hires (i.e. outside of their own communities), e.g. matplotlib or astropy. Often, we get quite a number of applications (> 25) inclining both qualified and unqualified applicants.

However, the process is quite some work: write a job ad, post it to many places, advertize on social media etc.

Can we avoid duplicating that work? Can we generate a pool / mailing list / ... of contractors? Vetting contractors? previous contractors?

There are a lot of details to work out to see if this is feasible. (privacy, equity, where to host, how to maintain).
The goal of this unconference is to talk through those details and see if it's possible and how we would do it.

Session Notes