Collab.ie Homepage

This week’s Tuesday Push is for Collab.ie, a site which aims to enable “collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills”. Collab.ie is brought to us by SmartCube, the people behind SwiftStore.

So, how does it work?

Say you have a great idea but you don’t have the tech skills to implement it, you could come to Collab.ie and post an general outline of the project and ask for someone with the right skills to collaborate with you on it. Similarly, if you have a product but no idea how to market it, you could find someone here to help you get on track.

Now, at first this just sounds like another job / CV site, but (and I’m guessing here) there are other ways to collaborate other than just being paid straightforward salaries. Some people will no doubt offer advice for free. Others may even lend a hand on a small part of a project in their spare time. Others still might want a stake in the final company or product in return. I guess this whole aspect won’t become clear until more people are using the service.

Something that does stick out to me though is that a lot of the collaboration seems to take place behind closed doors.  This makes sense for privacy reasons obviously, but also discourages people from joining in to collaborate. For instance, I wouldn’t spend my time on a message board giving advice to someone about SEO or SEM if someone else has already given them the same advice earlier in the thread. If the public’s responses to a Collab.ie posting are hidden from each other, they might be less inclined to take part in the first place. This is a little bit catch-22, so I’m not sure what the answer here should be.

I decided to try using the site and came up against some behaviour that was a little unexpected. When I hit the “Add a Project” button, rather than being asked to put in the details of my project, I was asked to login, with the usual “forgot password” link. However, I wasn’t given the option to register on the same screen, other than the link in the top right hand corner. Ideally, I’d have liked to see a form where I could post my project and add my login or registration details in at the end.

Apart from that though, the site seems pretty clear and functional to me. The latest projects list and the tag cloud give you a couple of quick ways into the content. All the expected links (Twitter, RSS) and pages (How, About, Contact) are easy to find. Overall, Lee Munroe has done a nice job on the design.

Any tool that can help move people and their ideas forward is very welcome, especially in current climate. A free tool like Collab.ie even more so.