Australia: Open OutSourcing – Rentacoder, Guru.com

I’ve been out and about, looking for developers, and lately focussed on Dev forums and open outsourcing sites. Open outsourcing is a matchmaking service for Developers. You, the client scope out the job and Developers pitch to build it for you. The interface is sort of Auction House-y or Ebay-ish. There’s escrow and warranties and all sorts of goodies to protect the buyer and seller, oops, I mean developer and client. Initially rentacoder took the honour as the one most known, and you could have flash or html websites built. But now the matchmaking service is for lots of different things. Guru.com has all sorts of jobs including technical writing and so on. I saw one which I can’t find it right now called something like AllSalons.com – hairdressing jobs. From wiki‘s page on Open Outsourcing:

Open outsourcing is a Socioeconomic movement resulting from the marriage of the open source movement and the recent trend towards the international outsourcing of programming.

Open outsourcing makes open source technology more accessible to businesses and individuals by employing an inexpensive international labor force of programmers, often on a contractual piecework basis. Small businesses may not be technical enough to efficiently utilize open source resources in-house or large enough to hire a full time technician. Larger businesses with IT staff may lack technicians with specific skills or knowledge. Open outsourcing also reduces some of the risks associated with outsourcing by making the resulting code publicly available through open source licensing.

An jobs social network/online community that surely will impact the recruitment industry but in what way? and I can’t help but wonder what impact it’s already had on Australian web agencies, particularly those that play in the low (read: cheap) end of the market.

Does Australia have an open outsourcing site or do we not bother – hooray for globalisation? What’s the impact on static portals like seek.com.au? I noticed a number of coders are from Eastern Europe and India and South America. Are you a codemonkey who’s got experience on these reverse eBay job watchamacallit websites? Which one do you use? Is codemonkey derogatory – it seems kinda cute to me? Can you knock up a cheap social networking site for me for under 500 bucks? Am I asking too many questions? Should I stop? Yes? :p