The position of the collaborator or freelancer

As far as the collaborators (or freelancers) are concerned, this can make life easier for them - if they are at all competent. They have no necessity to spend their time continuously trying to find auteurs and entrepreneurs who are needing their services. They will be able to form associations and alliances with complementary collaborators where they might introduce each other into projects.

Above all, they will be able to concentrate on their own areas of speciality where their growing expertise can provide a stability that is under their own control. Groups of such specialist might evolve viable inter relationships that survive and prosper independently of solution providers and the solutions they work on. Having the opportunity to collaborate with each other over a number of different projects, there will be an element of stability introduced that exists outside of the production environments. This can be enhanced through the ability of collaborators to maintain contact with each other via email discussion groups even when not working together on the same project.

In the specialist email discussion forums that I belong to, this is a growing trend. Collectively, the members have a large number of contacts and the nature of the projects that crop up nearly always require several different types of speciality. Members are constantly asking for others to participate where speciality assistance is required. In this way, the speciality collaborators, as a network of contacts, create a flexible swarm of experts that can selectively configure to tackle any kind of project.

Such an approach to creating business solutions would not have been practical in the pre Internet era. Without access to a large number of possible specialists and experts, it would have been far more efficient to maintain a permanent team. With the ability to create and maintain contact with a large number of experts in any niche speciality, it is now more efficient to build up a suitable list of contacts and bring them in whenever there is a need. This facilitates strategies which use the Genetic Algorithm approach, where uncertainty and unknowns can be coped with by mixing and matching different combinations of people and ideas in a continuously changing and evolving system that adapts to, rather than predicts change.

Significantly, this opens the way for collaboration between experts from all parts of the world. In the environment of the Internet, an expert is an expert whether they live in Silicon Valley or the back streets of an Asian community. As long as they have a real expertise and a connection to the Internet there are no geographic separations.