The underlying thought is this: at any given time there are many unemployed programmers, at all levels from graduate to highly experienced. These people have alot of underused coding time.

Is there a way to form these folks into startups/teams?

Almost like some sort of "startup in a box" in which developers can join a team, and everyone agrees to a predefined set of rules on equity.

The core idea being that everyone on the team is contributing their time at no charge.

Maybe it would at some level be a bit like online games where people come along and add themselves into a team.

A key part of this is that there is no employer, no recruiter, no ycombinator, no techstars making decisions about who can join a team. It is up to the team members themselves somehow.

Developers would browse the teams, see who is in them, the technologies being used, and perhaps even some overview of the software idea being built out by the team. They would choose which teams to join.

Maybe there could be some way that developers could perhaps do some practical coding tasks that actually contribute to the project and therefore prove to the team members that they should be a team member.

There's lots of open questions about this sort of thing, how it could be made to work, if at all.

What's in it for the programmers - that would have to be clear - maybe it's gaining commercial experience working with technologies that they are interested in - maybe it's some sort of equity after certain conditions have been met.

I'm wondering if anyone else thinks this (currently not fully thought out) idea has any merit?

Startups forming spontaneously from unemployed programmers who choose to donate their time, no permission required from anyone - could it work?

I don't want anything from this at all - I've just spent alot of time wondering about all those unemployed programmers and how they could be doing something with that time.

Can anyone else suggest any ideas on how it might be made to work? I'm looking for comments/ideas that might turn such an idea into something that actually works to get unemployed programmers programming instead of sitting around waiting for an employer to give them a job.

user:	hdx
created:	May 9, 2009
karma:	35