Are you a tech freelancer? Sepheo Coop wants you!

Sepheo (Self-Employed People Helping Each Other) is connecting tech freelancers with coops and other aligned organisations.

We do this by regularly checking-in with these organisations about their capacity needs and maintaining a list of freelancers that want to work with them.

You can join our list of freelancers here:

https://sepheo.co/register/

We’ll contact you every 2 weeks to confirm your availability for work.

Before connecting you with an organisation we will verify your skills and “cooperativeness” in a call with one of our friendly Sepheo Stewards.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the topic, or we can arrange a call over private message with @KingMob .

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Hey John, Nick & Luke, I think you have a great idea here that will help organizations that can’t afford a full-time developer.

There was something I noticed when I tried to register, there doesn’t seem to be any field validation? I was able to skip all 18 questions and still got the confirmation page. From a cybersecurity perspective, this signals that input validation isn’t happening and makes me nervous about giving you my personal data.

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I have gone into the form dashboard and turned on the required fields. If you’d like to research the issue further, we’re using an instance of nocodb to provide our registration form and directory database.

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That’s a good first step and great turnaround!

The reason I brought this up is because of optics. Without proper field validation it signals that there is a non-zero chance of exposing your freelancers data, which for some developers is not an acceptable risk. As a result, this could limit your talent pool.

Good news, from what I saw in the nocodDB github project, SQL injection was fixed last year but there are still a number of open security issues: 🔦 Feature: Security Enhancement · Issue #5225 · nocodb/nocodb · GitHub

If you’d like, we can chat about the impact of these security issues and potential workarounds for them.

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I want to note that the lack of form field validation makes it a lot easier to have a poke around. Currently, it’s hard to see whether filling in 15 steps will lead to a step that is not possible to fill in because of personal situations/etc.

That is, you can no longer click “next” a bunch to see what “step 16 of 18” involves without filling in all previous steps.

This would also be easy to tell if all the form fields were on the same page, instead of buried within each other, or if you could click next without entering data.

I hope you understand my thoughts. Thanks :]

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We’re currently discussing the design of the website, so I’ll bring this in, thanks for sharing

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Hey John, I was wondering if organisations can be members in Sepheo Coop?fractals do have capacity to do user research, service design, and some UX work so I thought I’d ask about whether that fits into the model.

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At the moment this doesn’t quite fit our model. We had an enquiry from another co-op looking to join as a group and basically we said that there was nothing stopping one or all joining as individuals, but we didn’t have an organisational membership system sorted out yet. Maybe one of you could fill in the registration form as if they’re an individual with the skills and capacity of your collective? This is kind of a stopgap solution though. The link is

sepheo.co/register

But in principle, our aim is to act as a capacity steadying mechanism for the coop sector and feeding work to coops is as much a part of that as feeding work from coops. And we’re discussing organisational membership internally at the moment so, keep an eye out!

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Perfect. Thank you! I will pass this onto the rest of people at fractals <3

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I wonder if we could possibly pin this to the top of the forum for a while to help you folks?

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Good idea, I have pinned it to the top of the Jobs category for two months to start with, is that OK or should it be pinned globally?

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Thank you, Chris! We would appreciate it being pinned globally as well

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I’ve made the top post a banner.

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BTW, the banner doesn’t seem to have a link to a user or this thread, so “such as yours truly” is a bit unclear.

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Thanks for pointing this out!

@chris could you please edit this?
the last two paragraphs as follows:

Before connecting you with an organisation we will verify your skills and “cooperativeness” in a call with one of our friendly Sepheo Stewards.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the topic, or we can arrange a call over private message with @KingMob .

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