I’m very, very excited about the following developments reported in the dutch media and blogosphere, and have asked our Dutch sympathizers to report on this in English.
Because of time constraints, I can at present only provide the Dutch-language links. This is truly the peer to peer future in the making, so I’m hoping for expanded coverage in the near future.
The NRC newspaper reports that a number of Dutch creatives are no longer requesting fixed invoices but let the client evaluate the value of the work that has been produced. One of these professionals is Martijn Aslanders who maintains a dutch lifehacking blog. It’s a form of self-determined pricing, but for services instead of products.
Our collaborator Martien van Steenbergen has been working with a team on a new scheme for sharing the revenue of teamwork, whereby each collaborator decides to what what other collaborators he will give his share to, after a phased process of inquiry into all possible contributions to a project. This insures that even non-measurable inputs are honoured and that there is a fully open discussion about each person’s contribution. See the page on Oprechte Deelgeving and the discussion about it, which provides the philosophical underpinning.
I am a creative myself (graphic design) and I find this practice both exhilarating and a bit terrifying. There have been many clients whom I felt I overcharged, but even many more who were undercharged, and they knew it. As far as I can discern from my Babelvish translation of the news article, the idea here isn’t so much to make money as to expand one’s contact network, yes? This also forces to produce better work, pick better clients, and do work one is passionate about and interested in. Theoretically, one could land a “contract” with someone like Microsoft to play around with some ideas, and would get paid only if MS deemed the results interesting. (I think Hugh MacLeod’s “Blue Monster Series” falls into this category)
There is a wine bar here in Berlin, actually (in Mitte I think), which adopts a similar policy: you go in, grab a table, and the waiter pours from the bottle of the night. When you’re done, you put whatever the drink(s) were worth to you in a tip jar and walk out.
Exciting stuff, thanks for posting!
It’s a very interesting topic to think about. One of the key elements in my view is the factor trust. This business model only is a problem if you don’t trust your counter party to compensate you adequately for services offered. But then again, who wants do business at all with somebody he doesn’t trust? And even if you were to be scammed by a parasite, how long a life would such a person have and how long would it take before his reputation would be smashed?
Another dominant factor is payment. Money is currently the main medium of exchange for services rendered. But who’s to say that payment can’t take place in a different fashion? You could get paid in goods, other services, intellectual capital, network or in good old “favors”.
Now the interesting side-effect of this “open payment system” might be that total compensation (in terms of money, network & trust) for providing the service might actually be a lot higher than when you’d simply write an invoice.
A final factor worth considering is that the open payment system would create some very beneficial side effects. Service providers would have to focus on delivering value in stead of merely spending time, intrinsically upping the quality of the service. If the prospect of providing value would be slim, then the provider would think twice before wasting his time. Clients would not only love that, but at the same would love to postpone the budget headache until after the service is provided ( i mean who can really be against paying handsomely when great value is delivered?).
In a sense the open payment system isn’t that new. It’s the way business has been done before the lawyers & accountants created the fear that one wouldn’t be compensated for value added, unless all the details of a proposed transaction were buried in piles of triple signed paperwork. Wouldn’t it be nice to do business like our grandfathers did? By a simple handshake. There’s really no reason we can’t. Just let go of the fear and have a little faith in others >:)
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Paul Salamone,
As a freelancer, I can see what you mean about the “terrifying” aspect of this. but, I agree with many of your points above, and I think that reputation systems will help this type of system.
For example, I may not even bother to engage someone who has a reputation for not paying people, or for underpaying, etc.