Is there some searchable member directory somewhere, other than Slack search on #CC2JRGVLK?

If you're on the desktop slack client, there's a UI element at the top that shows the number of members in the current channel. Click it to open a view that lets you search. I believe #C5T9GPWFL has the most members.

Hmm, that only seems to filter by name. I was thinking it would be nice and useful to be able to search for people near me, with certain interests, skills, etc. I suppose searching

in:#introduce-yourself

works but I haven't always had the best luck with Slack search. Also I imagine it could be useful for people to be able to signal that they're looking for a job, looking to hire, or looking for a co-founder. I'd be happy to help with discussing/looking for/building a solution if there's interest.

We have a handful of channels for different locales, to organize meetups and such. But this is the first time the idea of a proper member directory has come up, at least in this exact form. @Duncan Cragg @Kartik Agaram @Mariano Guerra — what sort of stuff do we have that might intersect with what John's asking about here? Maybe that list of projects that you made, Duncan? And Kartik, you've been a big advocate for organizing some effort to get people collaborating on projects.

I've been a big advocate for organizing some effort to get people collaborating on projects, too! 😁

It's not a contest <3

I think in practice just going to your local meetup is the base activity.

John's "with certain interests, skills, etc" is the new factor here, I think. I find that interesting, though perhaps a bit of a maintenance burden (ie: how do you make sure that the only people who are listed in this hypothetical directory are people who are, you know, still active here? Or perhaps there's other ways to keep the value high, even if the directory had a bunch of people who filled out their profile and then ceased being active.)

I think in practice just going to your local meetup is the base activity.

Ok… that begs the question, is there a directory of local meetups? 🙂 I'm not aware of there being one for where I live (Stockholm). I'm happy to volunteer to organize it. But I imagine lots of people don't live in major metro areas where there would be meetups, plus (as much as I appreciate in-person interaction) there's also value in connecting people virtually, i.e. around interests rather than locations.

As for the directory of local meetups, the way we do that is we have channels for different locales. You can see a list of all of them at the bottom of our member handbook: https://futureofcoding.org/member-handbook#location-specific-channels

+1 to that. I was thinking about this when @Hardwired3-Uncurled0-Outthink1 originally posted. What I have so far is a member -> intro lookup (see the final FAQ at https://github.com/akkartik/foc-archive) Another thing that might be marginally more useful than Slack search is http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/introduce-yourself/index.html which has the entire history of #CC2JRGVLK on a single static html page. Might be easier to browse. But yeah, neither of these quite covers the reverse lookup of clustering by various bits of metadata.

@Hardwired3-Uncurled0-Outthink1 We’re having a FoC meetup June 1st in Berlin, which isn’t Stockholm but isn’t very far by plane. 🙂

There's this, it's most of the people that posted something that ended up in the newsletter, it's not up to date but it's a good start: https://people.futureofcoding.org/

@Hardwired3-Uncurled0-Outthink1 what would be most useful for you?

I think the main use case was "show members within x distance near me" followed by "show members anywhere interested in x". I can get a rough approximation of that stuff by searching Slack and/or Kartik's introduce-yourself archive, so I guess I'm good for now. Though I recently just joined another Slack in another community and they have the same problem, which is annoying, almost to the point of waiting to build something to solve it. Almost 🙂