About matchmaker

A public board of asks and offers, jobs first. You write what you need or what you have, in your own words. The machine reads it, turns it into a structured record, and keeps looking for the other side after you close the tab.

Asks and offers

The unit here is not a job listing and not a resume. It is a signal of interest with a side: I need this, I have this. Two signals that complement each other are a match, whoever posted them. A job is one case. A two-person studio with capacity is an offer. A city department with a budget and no time is an ask. A person with a weekend and a skill is an offer. The vocabulary stays open on purpose, so the board can carry more than employment as people bring more to it.

Seen that way this is a brokerage, and brokerages are an old and large family. Airbnb and its peers are the mature ones: they match complementary interests at scale and, the part that took them years, they stand behind the match with guarantees that keep both sides safe. This board is at the other end of that road. It does the matching with a model reading plain language instead of forms, and it makes the market visible: who is asking, who is offering, what closes, what ghosts. Guarantees come later, if it earns them.

Trust is the other half of any brokerage, and it has two faces: the objective kind, a record of what happened, and the subjective kind, who vouches for whom. Both matter and neither is this project's job. A separate service, attest, carries them, independently of this board, so that a reputation earned here is not locked here. Sign-in is the first use of it: your passkey lives on attest and vouches for a key this browser holds, and that key signs what you post here. This site never sees a password or the passkey; it keeps your handle and a public key.

Where it stands

What feeds it, by name. Anyone signed in can suggest a source; it is probed before it is added, and nothing goes in unless it answered. Anyone can add a single listing they found, by link or by pasting the text.

A struck-through board is one that answered before and returns nothing now. The sources page has the dates, counts and errors.

What the machine does with a posting: it reads the seniority off the title (principal, senior, leadership, research, mid, non-technical), the shape of the engagement when the title says so (a residency, a studio, an R&D lab, a fellowship, a founding or fractional seat, a nonprofit), the mission and the technique, the region, and the pay when it is written down. A model refines what the rules got, and every record says which model touched it. The feed filters on all of these; senior+ is one tap.

What you can do with the barrage: save a ticket, mark it applied or contacted, decline it so it leaves your feed, keep a private note. Opening a ticket marks it seen, and a view shows only what you have not opened. None of that is visible to anyone else.

What a person can say about another: a vouch, one of four fixed claims, signed with their key and shown on the ticket or the profile. Asks are conversations: add detail, and the machine re-reads the whole thread, corrects its record, and names the best matches it has.

What is left

  • The introduction. A third person who knows both sides puts their name on a match. That is the whole point of a matchmaker and it does not exist yet as an object here. It will carry a state, notify both sides, and let either decline.
  • Outcomes and reputation. Replied, interviewed, hired, ghosted. Reported by the person, credited to the ticket, the organization and whoever made the introduction. Boards that ghost will show it.
  • Boards that only render in a browser. Several venture portfolio boards and niche lists show no text to a plain fetch. They need a headless browser before they can feed this.
  • Big boards, all pages. A watched page yields what one page shows. A portfolio board with thousands of roles needs paging.
  • Organizations as records with owners, and asks and offers of any kind, not only jobs, with regional instances.
  • A daily digest per person, and comments on tickets by people other than the author.

    • What the tags mean

    Missions are what the work is for: water and oceans, climate and land, cities and public goods, community and social trust. Techniques are how: simulation, geospatial, robotics, AI, crypto, research. Matching weighs missions first, then level. A role with strong techniques and no mission is a weak match here, on purpose. A role below your level is a weak match whatever its mission.

    What is public

    By default, everything: tickets, names, votes, the machine's replies. Your marks and notes are yours alone. If you would rather not say in public that you are looking, post the ticket as private: it is still matched, but strangers see only the side, the tags, the region and a one-line gist with no names or amounts.

    What it is not

    Not a recruiter. Not an application funnel. It does not apply for you and it does not send your details anywhere. The offers on the board come from public postings, with a link back to the source, and they close here when they close there.

    Why

    Job boards reward volume and ghost people. The work that matters tends to come through people who know each other. This is an attempt to make that visible: who needs what, who has what, and a machine doing the patient part of the matchmaker's job so that people can do the human part, the introduction.

    Built by Anselm Hook, in Portland, in the open. The code is a small set of modules that could each be lifted out: a store, a service, an aggregator with pluggable sources, an analyzer, a search, a transport.

    Reach us

    Write to anselm@gmail.com. If a posting here is yours and you want it taken down, or you run a board and would rather we did not read it, say so and it comes off; the same address is in the aggregator's user agent on every request it makes.