Charles Arthur in the Technology Blog of The Guardian:
The problem: how do you figure out who the people to recruit for your project are, when you're not familiar with the people in the area but need to get going?
Well, one option is to analyse submissions to Github, the open source code repository used by dozens of companies and individual programmers.
Biddulph explains:
“When I'm hiring, one of the things I always want to see is evidence of personal projects. Over the last two years, GitHub has become an amazing treasure trove of code, with the best social infrastructure I've ever seen on a developer site. GitHub profiles let the user set their location, so I started with a few web searches for Berlin developers. This finds hundreds of interesting people, but how do I prioritise them?”
Good question. Of course, another question would be “how do you know if they're any good?” For that, Biddulph moves to the next step:
“Another thing that I look for when building a good team is someone's personal network. I've always believed strongly in spending lots of time at conferences meeting passionate people who are smarter than me. A good developer can make themselves even more productive by knowing who to email, IM or DM to answer a question when they're stuck.”
From there it's a pretty short hop, skip and JMP to his solution…
More here. [Thanks to Marko Ahtisaari.]