Plenty of interesting ideas.
Another angle is helping companies set up a "center of excellence" for Solr
in their organization. Whether the center is dedicated in-house staff or an
outside vendor contract, the concept is still the same - giving people a
clear and direct place to go to get immediate, high-value support and
guidance. A rich guy's version of this mailing list!
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Alexandre Rafalovitch
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 9:17 PM
To: solr-user
Subject: Re: Any Solr consultants available??
On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Jack Krupansky <j...@basetechnology.com>
wrote:
OTOH, how many people are there out there who want to become Solr
consultants, but aren't already either doing it or at least already in the
process of coming up to speed or maybe just not cut out for it?
Well, I would target two groups:
*) Startups that just realized they need search
*) People who want to become consultants and want speed track to that
("already in the process" can take quite a while).
For Startups, I would do a weeklong version of what I did with my
one-day Solr Masterclass.
*) Bring your own data, we teach you very specific process of
development-oriented setup (e.g. start from
https://github.com/arafalov/simplest-solr-config/blob/master/simplest-solr/collection1/conf/schema.xml
, teach rapid iterations, ways to affect data in Solr such as URP,
Custom Search Components, etc).
*) Then teach debugging.
*) Then SolrCloud.
*) Then maybe touch on BigData as many SAAS startups will hit that problem
*) Then going into production.
*) Then, send them out with a (paid-for and/or subscription) dedicated
discussion group where the mentor would continue answering questions
as they bubble up. etc.
*) And more
For consultants:
*) you teach them to understand which problems Solr is good for
*) you teach them how to explain Solr to others.
*) Teach them (or build for them) great Solr demos.
*) Give them unsolved-but-tractable project and assist them in making
those happen (e.g. build a Solr-backed real solr-consultants website,
testing Solr clients with latest Solr, testing upstream integration,
creating Solr feature demos for 3rd party products that have Solr
inside, etc)
*) Build them environments to quickly test their ideas, skills, etc.
*) Give them tools and tricks to quickly build online identity around
Solr (blogging tips, link to their articles to build SEO, GitHub
repos, etc)
*) Build a network where consultants can pass work to each other based
on geography
*) Get preferential deals with commercial Solr components suppliers,
so the consultants get things like UI components at reduced price or
extended trials or whatever
*) Dedicated discussion group
*) If they are in the solr-consultants directory, charge them
subscription fees but give them a dedicated discussion group where
they can talk but also ask for particular features (e.g. better
examples, demo repos, language support, deals, commonly useful
components like the split/join filters, etc). Use those as projects to
drive next batch of developers.
*) Reach out to startup community and offer discounted/apprenticeship
model to access those newly graduated consultants.
*) Possibly provide things like USA corporation umbrella to bring -
say - a Philipino consultant to USA/UK for 3 months to train and then
let them go back home to establish the business.
*) And, again, a lot more
And, of course, gamify the whole lot wherever possible to drive the
speed of adoption :-)
Time is money.
Many of the things above exist for Solr, but they are all over the
web, often rotting after initial release due to lack of visibility,
etc. Other things are missing documentation, etc. Many of the other
things exist (e.g. consultant directories) but they are not Solr
specific. Frankly, many of the things that do exist have terrible
search, fixing that alone would be competitive beyond Solr. There is
value in building a happy singing YCombinator-style path.
Regards,
Alex.
Personal: http://www.outerthoughts.com/ and @arafalov
Solr resources and newsletter: http://www.solr-start.com/ and @solrstart
Solr popularizers community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6713853
