True, I'm still working on sharpening the idea. Here's a specific example task, and at the upper end of the size/price spectrum:
Let's say you want to write a Twitter search engine and adopt existing FLOSS software as far as possible (my position a few years back). You could ask us to find, research, evaluate, possibly test components and fit them together according to your requirements. You receive an overview of existing projects, ranked by criteria such as maturity and completeness, all caveats for your project and a draft architecture using the best parts (crawler, indexer, front-end). This you can then hand to the implementation crew to get them started in the right direction.
Or you just want us to find out if anyone knows how to reliably capture all tweets from the system and try and get the information. I knew that back then, but finding it out took a mixture of ingenuity and perseverance - hacker skills :)
Here are a few rough ideas for a more specific service offering:
- software intelligence service: as above, plus similar tasks
- the scientific computing service: fixing bugs, improving display of results/export functions, writing a module, all the way to creating an entire solution (in Matlab, Mathematica, et. al.) In some sense this is an low-end IT consultancy with experience in scientific computing.
- "math-backup" service (for non-mathematicians in science and technology): have us search for a result, apply it to your domain/conventions, check for proper rigour in your work, find "bugs" in reasoning etc.
As RAs do a range of tasks in their positions, so could a VRA.
Sounds like a decent idea to me. Virtual research assistants work in a lot of areas, and I don't see why this should be an exception. I could imagine myself finding your services useful in the future. Some thoughts:
(1) If you're doing a lot of smallish jobs for people, the setting up of each job could add to quite a lot of your work time.
(2) (1) suggests you'll need to bill high per-hour to cover for the time you'll spend setting up, or try to do fewer, longer jobs (or ongoing series of jobs with the same clients). Another advantage of doing more work for the same person is that you will spend less time getting up to speed in a new area.
(3) This leads me to think the best way for you to structure it would be to take on a small number of clients, each of whom is likely to give you work fairly regularly. Not quite one-off, not quite employee. Freelance intelligence-gathering etc.
(4) Think about who exactly will be your clients. Academics, probably not. They have full time research assistants, if for no other reason than that's how departmental finances work most of the time. Large companies, probably not - they probably have interns and other such cheap sources of work-time. I think the one-man/small startup scene might be your market. Think of Patrick McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator - patio11 on HN) - he developed a relationship with a woman somewhere to write his bingo cards, simply because it's a better use of his time to pay her to do it. And he can trust her to do it consistently well - so it's like I said, not an employee, but not one-off work either (i.e. he will go to her, not look around for anyone).
(5) Perhaps you could frame your services in terms of competitor analysis ("Write me a report on all companies working on group microblogging"), which can range from business details to technical implementations, and so on; and also, as you suggest, possible relevant architectures for a project or feature a client may be interested in.
It might be hard to pull it off, but I think it could be useful to some people / teams. My somewhat HN-intoxicated suggestion would be to write up some example reports, whip up a website, and come back and offer your services. You might be worth the money to some very busy small teams.
Let's say you want to write a Twitter search engine and adopt existing FLOSS software as far as possible (my position a few years back). You could ask us to find, research, evaluate, possibly test components and fit them together according to your requirements. You receive an overview of existing projects, ranked by criteria such as maturity and completeness, all caveats for your project and a draft architecture using the best parts (crawler, indexer, front-end). This you can then hand to the implementation crew to get them started in the right direction.
Or you just want us to find out if anyone knows how to reliably capture all tweets from the system and try and get the information. I knew that back then, but finding it out took a mixture of ingenuity and perseverance - hacker skills :)
Here are a few rough ideas for a more specific service offering:
- software intelligence service: as above, plus similar tasks
- the scientific computing service: fixing bugs, improving display of results/export functions, writing a module, all the way to creating an entire solution (in Matlab, Mathematica, et. al.) In some sense this is an low-end IT consultancy with experience in scientific computing.
- "math-backup" service (for non-mathematicians in science and technology): have us search for a result, apply it to your domain/conventions, check for proper rigour in your work, find "bugs" in reasoning etc.
As RAs do a range of tasks in their positions, so could a VRA.