Collaborative freelance board

Hello, fellow hackers!

I'm a long time reader and follow this community almost from the very beginning.

After reading a lot here and there, I got the idea that the best way to start a company is to ask questions first, before building anything.

So I'm asking you to validate this idea that I describe below in a set of questions:

Why people have to compete with each other on freelance boards? Why can’t we share the workload per project amongst individual contributors, as we do in our offices? Why people have to resolve to sub-hiring other freelancers and split big projects into chunks, acting a sort of project manager on behalf of a client (often w/o client knowing about such practice)? Why we have this invisible hierarchy of freelancers that includes experienced freelancers w/ high-starred profiles and an ocean of low-level first-time individuals, who have to take the smallest pieces of bigger projects w/o getting credit for it from the original client?

These are the sort of problems that remain largely unsolved on many freelance boards but have a robust and working solution in our traditional organizations.

Could we apply the sort of workload management we do at a web-agency to a group of strangers on the freelance board? Can we assemble a team of professional contractors just for a single project? Would they work together? Do we need to facilitate this process? How do we introduce a role of a team leader in such a structure? Would clients prefer to have their project picked up by a team of developers instead of choosing one sole contributor? Would it make sense for the client to pick what roles she needs for the project? Would we gain a more productive output from such entity than from a sole contributor?

What about time spent on the project? Would it be shorter due to the parallel work of multiple people or we’d waste more time in collaboration and communication issues? Who should be responsible if such a team does not deliver results on time, or at all? Would client have to pay partly for the work being done by some members, but not all of it? Would the unpaid members accuse their teammates of not setting them up for success? How should we rotate the team members that do not deliver their part of the job and when is the right time for it? Should the client worry about such rotations cause it would extend the project deadline?

What if some team member picks up the part that’s being neglected by others, should she get their cut of the pay? What about if different freelancers charge different amount of money per hour for their services? How would this affect the project budget? What about different personality types? Should we measure each team member’s performance based on 360 peer review results? Who would conduct and make decisions on such reviews? Should we build a graph of who likes whom and suggest project members based on personal preferences? Should we have a separate Project Manager freelancer position? How we’d identify leaders in each project and promote people to such a position? Would this person also contribute as a sole contributor? How do we define a measure of success for this manager role?

Thanks for reading!

What do you think? Do you share the same pain? Would something like this be useful to you? Would you pay for it? If so, how much?

Please let me know in the comments what you think about this idea!