Analysis of Portal for Social Network of IT Professionals

This paper presents an analysis of selected social networking portals for science, research and innovation as the first step in development of a portal for social network of IT professionals in the Czech Republic. First, actual portal implementations of four portals dedicated to scientific communities of researchers are analyzed, compared from the perspective of provided functions, layout and their interdependence and the main features are summarized. Then, the most important recommendations for the portal being developed are presented. The last part of the paper introduces two concepts of structured profiles - knowledge profile and scientific profile - that are proposed in order to precisely and explicitly express knowledge and scientific alignment of an IT professional. These two profiles will make it possible to search and compare IT specialists, their groups and projects or pair the users to the demands on the market. The paper concludes with a list of typical use cases where the profiles will be utilized.