One way to make sure your API has qualified and reputable developers from day one is to tap into an existing freelance developer community.
Popular freelance sites like Elance provide existing communities of developers with the skills an API owner or partner is looking for.
Elance provides access to their developer communities via a RESTful API.
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Using the Elance API, I have built a plug and play API developer community.
My API Evangelist,
API Developer Community prototype provides an example of what is possible when tapping into existing developer communities to satisfy the development needs of a new API community.
My API developer community provides the following tools:
- Browse Developers (by tag) - Allows users to browse developers by categories (tags) that are predefined. Settings to allow API owner to only display the type of developers, skills and tags that are relevant.
- All Developers Listing - Provides a paged results of all developers for an API area.
- Search Developer (by Name, Details, Tag) - A single keyword search textbox that provides a search results of Elance Providers.
- Developer Detail / Profile Page - Displays a single user profile page with selected fields by API owner.
- Featured Developer (Single Widget) - Displays a single random and/or highest rated developer profile.
The goal of my
developer community powered by Elance is to show what is possible when integrating an API community with other freelance developer communities like Elance.
The plug and play API developer community is written in PHP, uses the
Elance API for all of its data, and will be available on Github shortly.
