RFC My Professional Profile - presenting myself

[berkes]

Summary

A profile page where I present myself to the public and to my professional network.

Basic example

As a professional seeking contact with other professionals
When I fill in my flockinbird profile
And I set attributes to public
Then anyone looking at my profile will see my presentation
So that I can present myself to the public in a professional way

"seeking contact" can mean anything from "looking for a job" to "finding a freelancer for a job".

See the figma scetches for more details

Motivation

A main feature of Flockingbird is my professional profile.

Anything set to public by me, is searchable and indexable. Anything set to public is visible to any visitor (both registered and anonymous). This allows others to evaluate me by my presentation.

It acts as online CV, where I can direct people to, when they need to see my up-to-date CV.

Expected outcome is that people presenting themselves on Flockingbird turn up on public search engines for terms wich are
made public by the user.

Other users can now evaluate a profile and determine wether they want to interact with the person.

Detailed design

A profile has many attributes in various forms:

Set by me. I am the author. The profile is describing me:

A header image - Optional. To customize and communicate that this is a social profile.
An avatar - Optional. with fallback to default. Image or visual representation of the person.
Name - Required. Free form UTF-8 text string as textual representation of the person.
Biography - Optional. Free form UTF-8 multiline, text string, with markup as textual description of the person. Can contain links, tags emoji etc.

• Contact details - a list of attributes with metadata that allow me to disclose where people can contact or find me.
• Competences - A limited list of free-form tags that I use to present what "things" I know, have expertise in, can help with etc.
• Aspirations - A limited list of free-form tags that I use to present what "things" I aspire to do, learn, become etc.
• Resume entries - a list of entries describing experience, education, publications etc.
• Affilations - A list of organisations and people with whom the person affilates themselves.

ContactDetails, Tags, LimitedLists, ResumeEntry and Affiliate models are to be described in more detail elsewhere.
Privacy model and setting of all these attributes is to be described elsewhere.
Markup and "free form" limiations are to be described in the specific models.

Set by others. Other people are the author. They can annotate or enrich a profile.

This belongs to "basic CRM functionality" to be described in more detail elsewhere.

Drawbacks

Privacy settings must be in place, so that a person can decide exactly what information is disclosed to the public.
Allowing third party search engines to index public information may cause people not to want to create a profile at all. Features to curb that (e.g. robots.txt) are to be discussed elsewhere but may be a precondition for this feature.
Free form Resume Entries allow people to make a poorly rendered, nonstandard CV. The alternative is guiding users by taking away freedom and requiring an exact form to be filled out. While possibly "simpler", it is cultural limiting and condescending. Let people present themselves "weird" if they wish.
We do need some template and limitations. Such as amounts, lengths and format. Mostly technical, but also as security measure and anti-spam measure. e.g. not limiting the amount of "compentences" a person can add, allows for spamming by selecting every possible competence. But it also puts a strain on databases, storage and network.
Some format limitations in both markup and in fields is required to render the profiles properly in various forms and APIs as well as search indexes. In other words: allowing a fully free-form page that anyone can fill in at wish, makes it impossible for software to render in lists, notifications, emails etc.

Adoption strategy

Basic feature. Should be in initial release.

How we teach this

This is "my profile".
Conveying that "I own it" and that it belongs to me, the currently logged in user.
It is a main feature with a primary button in the primary menu.

Unresolved questions

See all TBD under details.

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Footnotes and references

[zleap]

This looks really good, at the moment I link from by blog to my LinkedIn profile which is far too clunky and slow, but something like this would be a much better option.

[hawkpro-1]

I know this is still experimental but when implemented would this be a static generated page or would there need to be a server those who cannot host a server.

[berkes]

Thanks!

@hawkpro-1, I like your idea, so turned it in its own RFC at #26
@zleap, good addition for the proof of concept which does this wrong, still. Issue at #25