Skills: entering, reusing, emphasis, mechanisms, display, searching

[sophiefp]

Skills and experience can be complex, and we want to make this easy to use, accessible and searchable. It also helps to have ways to encourage good quality input.

Where we says skills, we often mean experience as well.

[sophiefp]

Building up a selection list of common skills & experience would help with cross-referencing and as a prompt, as well as allowing free text entry for new skills.

Skills (and experience) could have some kind of quantifier/level, or be reinforced by others in the family who have worked with you.

A Word Cloud of skills for an individual could help encourage them to add to their details, and give emphasis to corroborated/strong skills. A word cloud of skills for the family as a whole could show our strengths and potential weaknesses.

Categorisation can be difficult, so it may be simpler to see how we go with one level of skills, just a list, and encourage people to put in both general and specific skills/experience, for example: programming, Java, Python, Ruby; refugee support, teaching, needs triage, counseling; healthcare, nursing, paediatrics, wound dressing. In the long run it would probably be useful to have the more generic skills emphasised in any listing or word cloud.

[eddiejaoude]

Faceted search refers to a way to explore large amounts of data by displaying summaries about various partitions of the data and later allowing to narrow the navigation to a specific partition

Also could use ElasticSearch Facets to filter through large tag cloud (now known as Aggregations) https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.x/search-aggregations.html

[eddiejaoude]

Also, could there be 2 skills lists:

1. User fills in for themselves
2. Others fill in for User - eg. I worked with person X and they helped me with Y (so a helped list I guess)

[sophiefp]

The elastic search thing sounds a good potential option.
If have two sources of skills then may have duplication, or we could have anyone inputs a skill of a person and it gets linked to person-verifications (one to many) - by the person with that skill and by other people. Someone may say you're great at something and you may disagree or not want it known, so you may not choose to verify it yourself, or may even wish to delete it.

[eddiejaoude]

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