Talao - The Future of Work
The topic of the day is freelance job markets and the gig economy in general. What's cool about gig economy? There's a number of things. First, it's an ability to switch from project to project, not being attached to one thing that can get boring over time, especially when the phase of active development is replaced by a phase of technical support and small updates. When you work as a full-time programmer, it often happens that way. First, you work on a project from the ground up, and it's both challenging and exciting. But, at some point, the project is mostly done, but there's still a lot of small improvements, consulting users and fixing bugs. This all is pretty easy and the following years quickly pass filled with that simple routine. I know a number of people who spent the first year in a company actually developing the software, and then they lingered there years and years afterward doing technical support of their own programs. In terms of professional development, those years can be considered wasted. On the contrary, in the gig economy, you constantly move from project to project, and there's not much time for respite or any kind of easy life, and at the same time, it stimulates a specialist to consistently learn and be up to date with all trends and new technologies. Taking into consideration the speed, with which technologies develop and change, this is probably the only way to stay relevant in those fast-growing fields. Another important aspect that makes gig economy different from the traditional job ecosystem is related to workers' reputations.
Ok, speaking of reputations in the context of gig economy. There's actually a fundamental difference in how workers and their skills are assessed on the gig market compared to the traditional job ecosystem. Let's compare. Usually, when looking for a new hire, a company examines a bunch of resumes, paying attention to such details as the candidate's education, previous workplaces, job positions, and declared skills. Neither of that gives a clear picture of candidate's actual qualification. For example, the fact that I worked in a big company with the well-known name doesn't automatically mean that I'm a high-skilled professional. As a matter of fact, full-time jobs allow a lot of ways of getting along without showing any kind of dazzling performance. As well as the record of me graduating some high-level college or university doesn't tell whether I've eventually learned to use this my academic knowledge in practice. As for the list of skills I put on my resume, this is just what I say. In fact, it's really not easy to check whether it's true or not. It gets even trickier, considering how quickly new technologies develop and previous technologies become obsolete. For example, even if a potential candidate spent years working in a high profile tech company, are his or her qualifications really up to date, regarding new tech trends? Another tool, the recruiters use to get a clearer understanding of what the potential hire is all about, is references. References definitely reveal more information about the candidate's actual performance, but, once again, to think about it, what references can actually tell? They might provide some insights about worker's performance in general, but this data can only be relevant in the context of that particular company, not giving any clue whether the specialist is going perform equally well with a slightly different technology stack. Also, references can be biased, apart from anything else, they reflect, in fact, how well the worker was getting along with management, and his or her personal characteristics, which mostly is not that important from the point of view of somebody who just needs a certain task to be solved. So, all things considered, the traditional job market doesn't really have a reliable system for evaluating its members. In contrast, freelance marketplaces present much more objective picture. Each freelancer there has a trail of completed tasks with ratings showing how well each particular task has been accomplished. The average of those ratings shows the worker's overall rating, and, what's important, it's easy to tell how good the candidate is at doing some specific tasks. The downside of traditional freelance marketplaces includes high commissions and centralized governance where platform's participants don't actually have a say in how the platform is operating, its rules, etc. Another important factor is that worker reputation related data is only relevant within this specific marketplace. In many cases it's crucial. For example, if I work for a long time on UpWork and then decide to move to another platform, I cannot transfer my rating and reputation, accumulated, say, during the years of hard work. It means, I'd need to start from scratch, and high earnings I was able to get due to my dazzling performance score would disappear as well. This situation makes one think of the universal system of scores and ratings, with its information relevant anywhere. In other words, the system has to be organized in a way that anybody could be certain that its data is objective and correct. This leads us to the concept of blockchain based decentralized freelance job marketplaces.
Presently, there are several projects of that kind, doing particularly well, but I'd like to focus on Talao project because it features several interesting concepts. Talao project is a blockchain based freelance job marketplace; it doesn't take a share of freelance workers' profits and, apart from individual members, it also includes professional communities. This is an interesting idea. In the context of the previously mentioned problem of assessing workers' skills, it's another approach to solving it. Professional communities are de-facto the thing in IT; you can easily get a sense of somebody's standing by the number of forks of his project on GitHub or the number of upvotes of his answers on Stack Exchange. The reputation gained in this way is the most transparent and objective. First, a community doesn't have any reasons to bestow this kind of reputation on somebody unless it's absolutely deserved. And the second, the community of professionals consists of people who are probably the most qualified to assess somebody's professionalism in a certain area. The Talao project's communities work in the same way. Each platform's member can submit a list of his or her skills, and the community, in turn, can check and decide whether this claim to mastering those skills is really justified. From my experience, this appraisal made by peers working in the same field, is the most objective and reliable characterization, if we talk strictly about professional stuff. Definitely better than references anyway. And here we approach another key concept of Talao project, namely, that it has a universally applicable blockchain based user reputation system. The important thing, this kind of rating system is organized in a way that makes it trustworthy outside the platform as well as within it. For example, I can use my rating there as a proof of my qualifications anywhere and those who will be examining this information won't need to trust the platform itself. Rather, the very principles of how blockchain operates and how data is recorded there make that data reliable. This, combined with the reputation score gained from freelance projects and reputation score received from the professional community, creates a truly comprehensive freelance worker's profile. Speaking of other project's features: the platform includes an encrypted data vault, designed to store its members' documents and certificates related to their education and work experience. All that information is available on demand to clients, and they also can take advantage of the platform's matching mechanism, allowing to find freelancers best equipped for a certain task. Another interesting characteristic of Talao project's platform that it's organized as a self-governing platform. This is another concept unique for blockchain projects, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). As opposed to the traditional online platforms such projects aren't controlled by the founding company or project team. In fact, the projects are governed by their respective communities with platform's key principles and rules enshrined in smart contracts. Apart from that, any change in platform's algorithms and rules can be decided through the consensus of platform's participants. The principle of self-governance is an important characteristic, in a sense that it gives a certain feeling of certainty and being in control. For example, I can be sure that the platform's algorithms are not going change overnight on a whim of developers. Additionally, smart contracts, being open and visible for everybody, make the platform's operations transparent, ensuring, for example, that reputation ratings are calculated in the exact way the platform's developers claim, and not artificially inflated for some members by some quirky hidden line of code. Which is one of the cornerstones, making the whole blockchain based reputation system trustworthy.
To sum it up, I think Talao project offers an interesting and viable take on the concept of the blockchain based freelance marketplace. Definitely, it has a chance to succeed. Starting from July Talao will conduct a token sale aiming to distribute 67% of its total supply of 150,000,000 TALAO Tokens. The fundraising goal is $12,700,000
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