what is the best way to hire a consultant to help with an open source project?

Question

I develop an open source Ruby On Rails project as a part of my job. However priorities at my work shifted and the project is now postponed for about a month. I know that that there are people who would like it to be finished sooner I would want to keep it going and willing to find money to pay for it's furhter development.

I would prefer to hire a person who is familiar with Free/Open source development and hopefully familiar with Agile environment. How would you recommend to find such a person?

I remember around 2000 there was a site organized by IBM (if I am not mistaken) for hiring developers for short-term or long term open source projects, but that site is now gone and I did not follow recent trends.

Answer 1

This might be out of your time-budget but I'd recommend getting to know some of the people on relevant IRC channels (#rubyonrails on freenode is the biggest I know of). If you're located in an area where there's lots of Rails development going on you'll probably find someone nearby on IRC that you can meet for coffee.

Answer 2

I would suggest using your company's usual employee finding method. E.g. advertise in newspapers, job sites, or use an agency. It would also be prudent to put an advertisement up on the page for the open source project.

Answer 3

If you have a real prospect depending on your project, if you want to get your project done and if you could get a testimony about your project / it's further use you shouldn't have problems to find someone who's a member of the ruby community. I see the point: The work should be done in a time-line and not some-piece-by-piece.

No offense meant, but "professional work" (i.e. taking the word literally, namely someone who's "doing it as a profession") means that the professional has to live from it. That could become (quite more) expensive.

Answer 4

The best option would be someone who is already familiar with the project, possibly contributing on a free-time basis, but if you had contributers like that, maybe you wouldn't be asking this.

Answer 5

put an ad on dice.com and be very specific about what you want, how long the job is, and what you're willing to pay. Expect hundreds of responses, most of them recruiter spam. And then hire someone you know instead ;-)

or you could find someone on stackoverflow.com (i hear it's a pretty cool new site for bit-heads) with a high rep who has answered lots of ruby on rails questions and who has a web site that says he/she is a consultant for hire, and ask them for an estimate