If you’re a freelance web programmer looking for the chance to do good work for transit, here’s your chance:
My firm Jarrett Walker + Associates is looking for quick assistance in designing a web-based tool, designed to sit on a transit agency or project website, that will help citizens think through some transit planning choices and suggest priorities. It requires the user to select different types of network for different parts of a city, and cover the whole city within a fixed budget of service.
We need the product in a month. Our budget is not to exceed $9000 but we would love it to be a bit lower.
This job is likely to be suited to a small, low-overhead web programmer who can do it quickly, efficiently, and yet creatively. It could lead to a future relationship assisting us with more tools of this type, as the need arises often in our planning projects.
Everything is explained in our simple Request for Proposals, along with two attachments referenced in it. (All materials are copyright Jarrett Walker+Associates and should not be reproduced for other purposes.) All you need to do is reply with a quick letter.
If our reader surveys are to be believed, STB’s audience is chock-a-block with software engineers and other denizens of the I.T. industry, so I’m hopeful there’s someone out there who can help, or knows someone who can. Please forward to the original Human Transit post to anyone who might be interested and qualified.
If you had 1 dev working full time for 1 month, $9000 is $56.25 (9000/(4*40)). That seems awfully low for a freelancer (remember, no benefits or anything). Most freelancers I talk to usually charge >$100 an hour. Maybe it’s possible to get this done in much less than 160 hours, I don’t know (I didn’t really read the RFP that closely).
I’d expect an experienced web dev to get it done in much less time than that. But, yeah, it’s not exactly mad money in any event.
This looks like a pretty fun project. I think if enough people know about it, someone will grab this opportunity. Personally, I won’t. Maybe if it was the summer. :) You might try adding this post to the various software users groups in the area. For example, Java Users Group (AKA SeaJUG) has a specific email list for this sort of thing, called SEAJUG-Jobs. I would imagine the Ruby folks would also be interested.
[should read: wasn’t the summer]
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