Edit: seriously, unless you plan to somehow monetize it, having Google do your sysadmin work, pay for your hosting, and present a well tuned web/email interface at no cost is a no-brainer. It's early enough in the project you could ask people to switch over.
At the same time though, if you host it yourself you can switch out the backend or interface whenever you want with no inconvenience to users unless going in to or out of a locked-in system like google.
Hosting is cheap, and someone running a "weekend hacker" group probably already has all the hosting worries taken care of for other projects. Besides, running things is fun.
Less than 48 hours ago there was a discussion in #startups on irc about getting help for small projects. It often happens that someone needs help for something that might take a few days, hours or maybe even less. Often someone is helpful, I have done my share of quick design mockups for someone and been helped by others.
But I have also been involved in slightly bigger projects for instance BrainRacer where I helped getting a landing page up and running fairly quickly. In exchange mahipal will help med with coding a small iphone app I want to do.
It just comes up enough that it must mean that more people than me and a few other would like to participate in small projects like this. So in the spirit of the WeekendHacker ethos i quickly put together this service and hope that other people might find it interesting.
http://WeekendHacker.net is for those tiny projects or cries for help. You sign up, get one email a day curated with cool little projects that people will post. No spam, no BS. Just cool little projects you can join.
It will be a website it's just that I post through the mailing list. I do write it in the FAQ but maybe I should be a little more specific. Let me know if you want to be taken of the list.
So far almost a thousand signups. Never would have thought so many people would be interested. I will send out a mail to kick it all off and once I have fixed the sendmail quota problem I have right now.
A potential issue here is agreeing on value. Coding tasks can look really easy when in fact they can be incredibly complex. I'm not sure a design for a landing page is the market equivalent of an entire iPhone app.
Argh. Lot's of signups. Dreamhost only allow for 100 mails an hour. Will work on expanding the quota and rest assured you will receive a signup mail soon.
Dreamhost specifically has a "mailing list" feature (called "discussion lists"). These have no limit on the number of outgoing mails and give users the option to opt-out of the list.
You can create multiple such lists for different subjects (and there's an API for managing them in addition to the usual DH Panel controls)
If you are getting that many request today maybe a basic web interface should be on the top of the list of things to do. Besides it may be a better user interface to checkout project titles rather then read one gigantic email every day.
I like this idea. I currently have a full-time job and am doing 15-20 hours of consulting a week so my projects are more like "late at night and weekend nights" projects. This appeals to me.
I would like to see some type of standard agreement around this along the longs of "I spent 2 hours contributing code that you're using, I get 1% stake if this thing every gets sold / gets funded".
I would prefer it if the agreement were "the code will be released under the GPL or BSD or MIT licenses and the art will be released under a Creative Commons license". That way there's no arguments later on about commercialization of it because the licenses would allow anyone to commercialize it. So your work helps the world, helps the other person and it helps you if you want to start selling it.
Following up on someone's suggestion to make a Google Group, why not make it a group on RiseUp? https://we.riseup.net/
Yes yes I know, it's an activist social network, but the software that runs it is pretty cool. It's called Crabgrass, http://crabgrass.riseuplabs.org/
and it's a nifty social networking tool. The thing that might be useful for your site is that it has wikis and discussion forums and task-lists built-in. Another nifty thing is that you can have networks of groups. So you can organize projects based on things like whether it was for a CodeJam or a weekend Hackathon or whatever.
Small feature request: include a plain text version of the email for those of us still using clients like Mutt. This is what we see at the moment: http://d.pr/rj1F
I also use Mutt, and just in case you don't know, you can use lynx or elinks to see html emails inside the client. It's very simple to setup [1]. Nevertheless, it would be nice if people could include plain text versions.
First, I think this is a fantastic idea and I signed up instantly, privacy issues notwithstanding. Not only can you exchange coding favors and build a reputation, you can also practice your design and development skills in a variety of projects, which might be an additional major draw. I can't wait for this to get underway. This is one of those ideas that I wish I thought of.
That being said, I really think you should explore this idea further and create a dedicated website for it. A mailing list is great and easy to maintain and all, but a reputation-based service has to have the appropriate mechanisms to work well. It wouldn't take that long either.
Envision a site where jobs are listed as they're approved and removed as soon as they're completed or claimed, with discussion and advice flowing freely between parties. The site would keep track of projects both requested and completed by each member, and award appropriate kudos within the community to encourage and reward participation. People would be able to link to their profiles, which would display which projects they completed for which sites, on their resumes or facebooks or whatever. You could make a leaderboard of top contributors, and perhaps a provider request system that may eventually involve money. It would be like Elance except eroding the barrier between "service providers" and "employers" - instead, everyone would be both.
There's tons of potential here. Once you get critical mass, monetization could go far beyond ads: off the top of my head, you could skim paid projects, offer premium filtering capabilities and other services to paid premium users, or even get paid by companies that come knocking on your door wanting to hire some of your more skilled members. You could maybe even provide a service for members to tutor other members (serving those who go to your site for practice) and take a % of that $ too.
I realize this goes far beyond a simple "scratch my back and i'll scratch yours" paradigm, but I really think you might have something. The cherry on the top is that some of the smaller features that you might want to add to the site can actually be crowdsourced to your community :)
So yeah, great idea. A community of developers that interact with and work for other developers in exchange for the same being done for you? Sign me up.
I will sign up, but here's a problem I forsee: How many here are hoping for help with your project? (I raise my hand here) Now, how many of us have free time to spend on other people's ideas? Maybe I'm projecting, and I hope I'm wrong, but I fear that things will be stacked in the first category.
based on all of the feedback here and some of the good ideas that people have come up with, maybe one of the first projects sent out should be to help you build out some of the smaller/more simple features. contributing to weekend hacker will, in theory, benefit everyone involved.
1500 signups. Projects are beginning to come in. The confirmation mail is an issue that I am working on solving. So please be patient working in a car on my way to Berlin. Gotta love technology.
From other comments I realise that this appears to be a mailing list, so an email is kind of the point, but still it could be made a lot more clear.
Just a bit of advice.