Blackbox – A New Approach to Business Organization

Speaking, once again, about gig economy and the problems of organizing freelancers. It makes perfect sense to bring them all onto one platform designed to coordinate their efforts while they work on various projects, to facilitate their communication with their employers, and so on. It's different from the traditional corporate structure because it allows a big deal of flexibility, regarding onboarding and discarding people. Hiring full-time employees has its advantages and disadvantages. As well as working with independent contractors and freelancers also has its advantages and disadvantages. Why not combine pros and eliminate the cons of these two approaches?

So, the key advantage of hiring full-time employees is that it's much more convenient to manage, control, and coordinate an organization, where everybody is located at one specific place, following the same schedules, guidelines, and instructions, and, generally, easy to get in touch with. Also, there's no uncertainty like with the freelancers. Like, what prevents any such person from disappearing without a trace one day, without leaving any clues or tips, allowing to track and capture him or her. It's the information security problem as well. If I have some sensitive and valuable commercial information within my organization it's important for me to avoid any possible leaks. It's more difficult to sleep well, knowing that some independent contractors have access to a part of that secret business data, and I don't have any means to guarantee that those people, located in the other part of the world, wouldn't steal it, or somebody else wouldn't steal that data from their computers; after all, they are not part of my corporate IT infrastructure, and I have no idea how well they are protected. So, the upside of relying on a team of full-time employees is that it's easy to direct and coordinate their work, plus there's no problem in finding anyone when it's necessary (especially regarding urgent matters), and since everyone uses the same corporate IT infrastructure, with its firewalls, filters, and restrictions, there's lesser risk of intentional or accidental information leaks.

The downside is that when you put those people on your payroll you are sort of stuck with them. Like, for example, maybe I need a graphic designer on rare occasions when I need some graphic design to be done. But the rest of the time he'll likely have few things to do. It's bad both for the designer and for the business. It's much more convenient to hire a freelancer for one specific task and after the problem is solved, we can just part ways until the next opportunity to work together presents itself. Another downside of hiring full-time employees is that I'm limited to people, territorially and geographically located close to the physical location of my enterprise, or office, or whatever. The bottom line is that sometimes there are simply no sufficiently qualified specialists I need in my area. Or they are sufficiently qualified, but their wage expectations are way higher than I can afford to pay them. Meanwhile, there's an abundance of highly skilled in this area professionals offering their services for a reasonable price, who have a misfortune to live in a different country in the other part of the world.

Ok, the bottom line is that there are positive and negative aspects of the rigid corporate structure with a fixed list of employees, who hang out in that office for ages, sometimes without having much to do, but at least they diligently clock in on time every day, so in an unlikely event when I actually need something from somebody I know where to find that person - he's in the office. As well as there are ups and downs of working with freelancers; particularly I cannot guarantee that they won't disappear one day carrying with them valuable corporate secrets. Also, it's hard to control the working process of somebody, whom I've actually never seen in person, and who lives on the opposite side of the globe, occasionally sending me reassuring e-mails. I never can be sure whether this person is actually working or not; I don't know on which stage of readiness is that task I need to be done, and so on. Well, with all the IT technology we have, why then not to combine the flexibility of working with freelance teams with the safe and reliable ways the things were done when everybody shared the same office space?

The Blackbox project is an online platform facilitating organization of teams and enterprises, working on various projects. It's not particularly a freelance job marketplace or job board; rather it's a framework for enterprise organizational templates. In other words, various specialists from different fields can sign up on the platform, and afterward, the platform allows them to self-organize into coordinated business structures. It's a somewhat novel concept of an Internet platform providing mechanisms for the creation of project teams that don't need the centralized management to operate. The platform itself fulfills this function, assisting onboarding, offboarding, and coordination within and across teams, forming organically around tasks submitted to the platform by clients. On the whole, it offers a new paradigm of a self-governed team, enterprise, or business organization. In other words, an organization that can function without management, or rather, in this case, managerial functions are delegated to the platform's algorithms. It's an interesting concept that is particularly relevant in the context of gig economy and distant work. What distant work currently lacks is the structure and mechanisms of coordination between different freelancers, working on the same project. This creates a situation when freelancers are either temporarily incorporated into existing business structures being coordinated by their management, or they are only involved in simple projects, not requiring more than one specialist with one specific set of skills. For example, let's consider a situation when a client needs to establish his Internet presence in the form of an online shop. Such a task would require the involvement of professionals from different fields - designers, programmers, copywriters, SEO and SMM specialists, marketing specialists. What makes it even more complicated is that the work of all those specialists needs to be coordinated. If the client hires them separately, say, on a freelance job board and then tries to coordinate them by himself it would require a titanic managerial effort and, without sufficient qualifications, more likely than not such an endeavor would fail. On the other hand, the client can hire an already formed and well-organized team. Now if we take our typical freelance marketplace and add to it an ability to form coordinated teams then we get something similar to Blackbox project's proposition.

The key innovative element of the Blackbox project's platform is that it's essentially a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which doesn't have or need any central authority to successfully function. Without getting in the details, let's say that DAOs operate relying on a set of predefined rules built-in into the system and carried out automatically whenever the situation suits conditions requiring applying certain rules. All platform's rules and policies are visible to every user, so everybody tacitly agrees with them. If the policies need to be changed the DAO platform puts into action protocols, allowing its participants to alter existing rules through the majority vote. The key thing is that any platform's change needs a consensus of all its users for it to be implemented. In the case of the Blackbox project, such governing principles also cover all the matters regarding the management of online enterprises spontaneously emerging on its platform. It's also worth noting that such an automatic management principle allows a big deal of flexibility, regarding the team's composition, namely, who is going to be involved in what task. At the same time, the way I understand it, parts of such digital enterprises are interchangeable, as well as their accumulated experience.

To sum it up, Blackbox offers an interesting concept, potentially combining advantages of gig economy and distant work with structured and well-coordinated nature of traditional enterprises.