Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Folksonomies, mashups, data visualisation, UCD, usability, experimentation?

One of the speakers from Web Directions South this year, Sebastian Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, just got in touch this morning to say his team is looking to fill a couple of developer roles.

Sebastian’s presentation – Social Media and Government 2.0 – was one of the highlights of the conference this year, and the museum is acclaimed for its visionary projects. If you’re looking to work at the true cutting edge of social media and the web, this is a fantastic opportunity.

The museum is looking to fill two developer roles, one working specifically on the Collections Australia Network (CAN) project, and the other on a new experimental project called About NSW.

Both roles involve developing next generation web services for large datasets and have a great deal of scope for creative experimentation. The Collections Australia Network (CAN) role involves the continued development of a national collections database portal as well as cultural tourism site. CAN works across the Australian museums, galleries, libraries and archives sector and there is a huge pool of data waiting to be explored, visualised, and made more useful. CAN runs on a custom CMS built with PHP and PostgreSQL.

The About NSW position involves developing cross-government ‘mashups’ – pulling together data from multiple sources using harvesting and scraping methods and APIs, to create new services that mix this government content with museum data. The About NSW project runs on Plone CMS, but has a lot of room for experimental visualisation and mashup work outside of Plone.

The museum is a PHP shop but there is scope within these projects for experimentation with Ruby on Rails.

Both roles are based on a 35hr working week (rather than the 35 hr day that you might be more used to) and have flexible working conditions. The positions are both temporary positions. The Museum is located in central Sydney, a great place to be with summer approaching.

The full position descriptions and application process:

• Collections Australia Network Online Application Developer (Clerk 7/8 – total package up to AU$84,855)
• About NSW Online Application Developer (Clerk 7/8 – total package up to AU$84,855) info at

Applications close for both positions on 29 October 2007.