Ok ... so I've got this idea. It's been gnawing at me for quite some time. Basically the idea is a website that serves as a social networking site for IT workers. Ok well it's a bit more than that. The underlining premise is that IT work is becoming increasingly more complex everyday. It does not matter how much of an expert you become in one area, because the next piece of software you are forced (or choose) to use may work according to a totally different organizing philosophy than the one before. When it comes to complex tasks you often find that there are critical gaps in your knowledge that are necessary to do a given task well.

Think of it this way. All the information you need to do a job is represented by the area of a box you draw on the page. Now draw in circles or other shapes around it which intersect with it at random points. These other shapes represent the knowledge you have readlily available to you based on your own experience, quick web search, or from other people you are working with. Some of this information relates to the task at hand but a lot of it doesn't unfortunately, and so you are left with gaps I mentioned earlier. These end up taking you a week or more of searching the web looking for those missing pieces that connect it all together. You spend most of that time reading info that overlaps with your current knowledge, but you figure if your patient enough with the haystack you'll finally find the needle. Really the best way to fill in these gaps is to ask an intelligent person. If they know they answer, great you're golden - if not, an intelligent person will let you know you're barking up the wrong tree and you can move along to someone else (webpages unfortunately don't do that so well as of yet). The problem is most people have a fairly limited network of people they can call on. Especially people like myself who work for smaller companies that don't have the luxury of supporting a lot of specialists. No one has the time to become an expert in anything. So maybe you have a vendor that you get some limited support from - or a friend - or an acquaintance from some training class you took a year ago. Some of these may have, answers but just because they have the skills to help, doesn't mean they necessarily are available when you need them to be.

So, I'm finally getting to the idea. Think of the site as an insurance policy for IT guys who by nature of their position are forced to be generalists and support every piece of software someone in the company thinks is a good idea to buy. The way the policy works is you have to pay premiums every month. This is done in the form of making yourself available in some form (email, IM, skype, whatever) to fill in those critical gaps for other people. If you don't do a satisfactory job your policy gets revoked and your out of luck, so you need to give people timely and accurate help. If you don't know something, just say so, so the person can move on, and then edit your profile so other people aren't misled as well into thinking your expertise extends further than it really does. The problem in the site becomes that some people by the nature of their experience and skills are going to have more to contribute then others. I think it is important to recognize people's experience and skills, but I also see that the increasing complexity of the IT world will make this hierarchy less important over time, meaning even smaller bits of information can be equally important as larger pieces if they are in a strategic area that acts as a bridge between two technologies. This is where this site becomes really worth something when it goes into the nooks and crannies that people are forced to live with everyday but are never make it into the manual.
I'd like the site to have some sort of points system that shows who is making the contributions that people value the most. In asking for help from a fellow user you will have to pay some of your points to them. This ensures that if a person is only looking for help and never giving it, they will quickly run out of capital to so. If the network grows to a significant size this capital can be of some real value when you know that you can turn it into some lifesaving information at the drop of a hat.

So my question is, does anybody else know of a site that is trying to do this? If so I'll join that site. I think the idea is too good to spoil by trying to spoil it with all kinds of lame competitors. I know there are sites like experts-exchange.com which I personally think are just evil. They let google search their site so that your searches lead you to their pages, but you can't see what the google spider saw unless you pay money. I mean comeon. I'm not looking to make a lot of money. Maybe I'd run some google ad-sense to cover the costs, but I think by making the site free you make it so much better. The only requirement for the site is that you have expertise within the IT field. I intend to measure this by personally screening everyone that becomes a member of the site to ensure they have sort of credentials. Then the other screening process becomes people's own responses to the help you give. If you aren't contributing to the site you are gone.

All right so hit me up with some questions or comments. I guess I shouldn't have used the word social networking, it conjures up images of MySpace and Friendster which have little to do with this site, although I do hope the site helps build relationships. I hope the site has more to do with Wikipedia, a great place to find that obscure thing you are looking for fast. End of story.