Future Plans

Sunday, March 16th

I've been planning my summer and I have a few different options available to me right now. Besides working full time, I'm also entertaining the idea of taking a food service job at nights and spending the days working on one of a couple of different projects. First, there's the Clubs project.

I'm in talks with some student leaders who are interested in putting their support behind Clubs, which would mean that development can start this summer or soon thereafter. Working on Clubs alone sounds like a daunting task, while working on it with my partner would require telecommuting and common availability, which may be too much to ask. However, I'm eager to see my dreams for the project realized and there's no time like the present, they say.

Then there's two different ideas I have to give myself practice as a webmaster (for a site with actual visitors): a linguistics portal, and a resource aggregation portal. The first is essentially self-explanatory: linguistics on the internet is a sparsely populated field compartmentalized into many university linguistics department websites and a couple of cross-institutional organization websites (like that of Linguistic Society of America). I'm interested in starting a new portal for linguistics--built with Django, of course--that serves as a knowledge base of linguistic concepts, publications (with a Creative Commons or other open license), events, and organizations. A major feature of this portal may be an AJAX tree editor which can output syntactic trees in XML or PNG.

The second portal I'd like to create would be one providing access to a network of specialists in different high-tech fields. It could serve as a matchmaking service between individuals or start-ups and the knowledge or talent they need in order to make a new product or service a reality. I'm going to play with this idea for a while until I have a more concrete definition of its function, but I think that there's promise in the field of filtered talent matching (see The Ladders.

Tags: Ideas