In the time between now and our last blog post, we’ve made some pretty big strides. After interviewing Josh, the founder of Loconomics which is a San Francisco based network of freelancers that essentially functions as a worker-owned TaskRabbit, we’ve decided to collaborate and help Josh with his launch as well as thinking about that in perspective of our original idea of Co-Everything, a network of co-ops functioning on a co-op to co-op as well as a co-op to customer set up.
As of right now, Loconomics functions solely as a tool for freelancers. Josh has given us access to the developers version of the tool so that we can preview its functions and use it to learn something about our own assumptions as well as their own. This past week, each member of our team took the time to set up an account on the website from the client and service provider sides. Both sign up pages look very similar, but the functions within each account, once established, are very different. On the service provider side, you are able to create your own (very limited) freelancer profile. This profile includes an “about me” section as well as education information and a job title. From here, you are also able to set up your available scheduling for your services. On the client side, you are able to sign up and search for available services. Currently, there are only sample services in the developer’s version. For example, you are able to search for “Services for your Home.” From here you are given options like “Housecleaning,” “Painters,” and “Gardeners.” You can then select your preferred services and “book” an appointment to have something done when you add your payment information as well as your top three preferred time slots.
I think one of our most important next steps is deciding exactly how closely we want to work with Loconomics and whether our original idea of Co-Everything is Loconomics itself, or whether it will just feature different aspects of Loconomics platform. We’ve discussed this issue in terms of how our tool would be different if we did gear it towards co-ops as opposed to just freelancers, such as different use of language, collective identity (in terms of signing up as a co-op and beyond), and a user base of members within each co-op. We are also interested in how we could localize the tool and make it more Boston-related and cater towards different socio-economic groups. Currently, Loconomics offers services like dog-walking and massages, which insinuate that it is geared to those who have the disposable income to splurge on such things; we would like to make it more universal and accessible to those who may not have the same privilege.
As for our next steps, we would like to use our real-world user testing to test which assumptions about the current platform are true or false and record and report back to the Loconomics team. For example, who has or doesn’t have access, who is being included or excluded, who is the target audience (TaskRabbit users)? With this information we’d like to delve deeper into figuring out what kind of relationship we actually want to have with Loconomics.
There are some exciting things ahead and we are interested to see where this next week takes us.
Link to our slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1buh7rBaJpr3y5VaJ0GmFuv64AXP2pS2tCLqbV5lm-uc/edit?usp=sharing