We're regularly asked by our user organizations about sharing job opportunities with one another. DIA isn't a job board and we don't aspire to be Monster.com or Democratic GAIN. On the other hand, it's a fairly natural fit -- a community of organizations with some similarity in outlook and needs, sometimes including specific familiarity with our platform. So we don't want to maintain an employment database or add unfunded mandates to our shop, but it makes sense to let people share. What to do? A couple of weeks ago, we asked for some input on the DIA Support listserv. You're looking at the result. The item at right is a simple web widget to which anyone can publish a job in the DIA community and which anyone can use to keep up with those jobs. I've seeded it with a few of DIA's own jobs,* and a couple others among our user groups that I happened to know about. It's not meant to be comprehensive -- the point, in fact, is that it's meant to be community-generated. Anyone can add to it. This is a bit of an experiment for us: we'll have to see if people actually choose to use it. But experimenting with widgets is darn cheap to do.

For Employers

To add a job, just tag any job posting page anywhere with a del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia social bookmarking account using the tag "diajob" (without the quotes). That's it! It may take a couple hours to hit the stream. You can remove postings by deleting your bookmark or by removing the tag from your bookmark. We're asking people to observe the convention of titling these posts:

Job Title, Organization (Location)

However, it's not like we have a police force out on it. For the rest, we're going to decline to define "Jobs in the DIA Community" and trust said undefined community's sense of what to share.

For Job-Seekers

Slap this widget anywhere you like -- if you use a personalized start page or want to put it on a blog, go for it. Actually, it's also ready-made as a module you can add to a dashboard in Salsa -- "Jobs in the DIA Community" under "Stickies". Okay, upon further review, it's throwing a security notice, so we cut it. But you can drop the code in as a custom sticky in your own headquarters if you're prepared to deal with it. Musestorm offers several designs I happen to find attractive, but you're not limited to those. Drop it into Grazr or mash it up with another feed or just subscribe in your feed aggregator by going straight to the source RSS feed.

How it Works

Many readers will have already figured this part out by now. It's a Yahoo Pipes mashup of tag feeds from the two social bookmarking services in question. By pulling from social bookmarks, it's pretty easy for issuing organizations to de-list simply by de-tagging. By using Yahoo Pipes, it's also easy for us to slap on filters if something needs expunging, or to apply periodic date ranges to keep the job listings somewhat current. (Pipes are also ridiculously fun and really make accessible the web's data aggregation power.)

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By sheer coincidence, prolific nptechnologist Beth Kanter yesterday published a screencast with widget basic orientation. Widgets are entertaining, easy, free and pretty powerful tools with ready application for nonprofits looking to energize distributed supporter networks -- scores of loosely affiliated bloggers, MySpacers, that sort of thing -- or to jazz up one's own site. Beth's boot camp is well worth watching: *And conversely, added the widget to DIA's "Job Opportunities" page.