web db for independant projects

Brice Vandemoortele

I've been recently confronted to the difficult task of gathering talents around a project. That my own project might be boring or anything isn't the point here - or maybe it is, but still, hear me out.
I believe many artists would like to work on cool projects, whatever they are students or senior, but they don't. Requests and mods are among the darkest and sound-echoing corners of most forums. Why is that? Is there a gap to fill there?
I think not every project is inevitably lead by noobs or is very time consuming - not trying to say mine isn't. Many people would enjoy having an artist spending time doodling on their project, even if it's once in a while. Time even experienced artist like to spend on something else than their work, Polycount is an obvious proof of that. Couldn't these interests be shared?
I'm thinking of paying someone to create a database to help this out, I have enough space and bandwidth to host it, and even some remaining web skills
What do you think? What about a simple list of people with various informations, such as their levels in various field (programming, uvs, texturing, sculpt,..), their interests or desired style (checkbox maybe? medfan/scifi/fps, whatever classification we use, could be more than one), available time, skills they want to train, url of samples etc.
Leads could then do manual query on this DB. Or maybe they could enter a list of desired profiles with informations on their projects and the DB would automatically do the match, sending a mail the corresponding artists once every week/month/... "hey dude, this time you might be interested in this and this and this, pick one".
We could go further with a ranking system/trusted users to avoid inappropriate stuff "no no kiddo, you're no senior concept art"
I'd like to hear your toughts

JKMakowka

In general not a bad idea, but due to the high crap to quality project ratio in the modding community most artists prefer to choose projects themselves, instead of beeing bombared with emails from 14 year olds.

Asthane

It's an interesting idea, but JKMakowka is right in that you definitely wouldn't want to operate it like a portfolio database. If it were me, I'd make it more like a registry of open development projects: allowing registered users to look through the database and find projects, see all of the assets that are planned or completed (whether it be design, script, coding, art, etc) and check out assets for a maximum of a week or so at a time (and only those assets which have been requested. No scores of people uploading their unwanted design docs if the project manager doesn't want them). You'd of course need an extensive categorization and possibly rating system to help people find what they want, etc.

That's how I'd do it anyway, but it'd be a major project writing and hosting it. Definitely make the actual contributors the active party though, whatever you do.

Brice Vandemoortele

I get your point There is several pros and cons. One of my concern of listing projects rather than artists was that it's the way most boards already do it, and it doesn't seem like it's really working. However, getting communities to use the same database, using iframe or included in a way to their specific forums/portal/boards, would already be a big step.
Another problem is that while listing by project, it's again the artist that has to check regulary for new project, and thus has to make the first step rather than the projects' owners. I think that we shouldn't bet on this, there HAS to be a kind of automatic matching to avoid waiting for artists (or whatever kind of talent) to check the database. If there's a matching, then there's a profile we're refering to to make that match, thus implying a list of artists' profiles we could list anyway. I agree this shouldn't be a portfolio list, cgsociety already do that way better than we could. A simple reference to external ressources would be enought: portfolio, linkedIN etc
Another thing is that the artist is again only judge on the quality requested and his ability to be efficient in these projects. The common tasks of "filtering" is still needed from projects' leads. We could avoid this by using a rating system, but it's again very dangerous since anybody could vote. A restricted group could be the only allowed to rate others - such as "gold members" or seniors - but it implies a stronger moderator presence to name these members etc. We have to avoid restriction to subscription, since it would lower the number of artists, wich is not the goal.
We can't avoid noobism, but there's ways to keep quality levels, with the help of established communities such as this one. We definatly can't give direct contact between leads and artist (spam), even if we can't avoid people to search on ppl's websites. This has to be a non intrusive list of proposals, on a weekly/monthly basis such as a newsletter. Popular or highly rated project may benefits of a greater presentation, such as banners.
These newsletters could be separate in two: projects that match your search criteria, and projects from leads that have picked you up in the list.

Rob Galanakis

This project would only work once it reaches a "critical mass" so to speak and is able to roll along itself. I just don't see it as something feasible or needed from an indie perspective, I don't see where the demand or niche for this is. Things like this work professionally because there are always artists looking for work, however, there are not enough artists to go around on the hobbyist scene.

If you have the drive and want to do something, there are plenty of organizational community things you can work on; I just don't see an art talent database as something that would be useful or feasible. I think time would much better be spent creating or taking over or working with one of the project repository pages, with places to upload pics and progress, make sure to keep it updated by keeping an eye on different recruitment forums, and do a hell of a lot of promotion. Something like that I think there is a use for.

Penzer

What would be a good idea, is for schools to have their students contact info available for mod teams. There are a lot of students at a lot of different schools that might have the time and energy to do work for mod teams. I know if I'd had mod teams approaching me earlier on in my time in school, I would have totally considered doing mod work for them.

In the last two semesters of the program I took, student artists, coders and designers are all organized into mod teams for a big project. Not all schools have something like that, and there must be a TON of up and comers looking for exposure in any way possible. If you're looking to set up a database of artists for mod teams, I think getting in touch with as many cg, game art and programming schools as possible would be a good idea.