As some of you know, I’ve turned into a serious fan of Roam, the novel notes app that’s been making waves lately, and with good reason. It’s a brilliantly conceived and executed product for really frictionless collaborative knowledge capture and organization.
I just created Art of Gig roam database, which I am sharing initially with paying subscribers of this newsletter. Right now, it’s publicly editable. We’ll see how it goes and later open it up to everybody. We may switch to public-readonly (with invite-only editing permission) if necessary, but I’d like to keep it as open as possible.
I had the idea of creating a Roam database for the Art of Gig community a few months back, but set it aside on my someday/maybe list, since it seemed like an important but not particularly urgent thing to take on. Well, now the pandemic has created the urgency, so let’s do it.
To get oriented, check out the Welcome page and go from there.
My plan is to evolve this iteratively by prompting all of you to do ONE simple thing each week, though of course you’re welcome to go nuts and do more.
For the first week your prompt is: Add yourself to the Directory page.
As I wrote last time, with the Coronavirus pandemic in full swing and the global economy in the early stages of a serious meltdown, the gig economy is particularly vulnerable, since it is hard for state agencies and programs to even “see” us and our needs. It’s even hard for us to see each other clearly. Let’s start fixing that.
I hope this database starts out by evolving rapidly into a helpful resource for gigsters in the immediate response to the pandemic, but then evolves into a generally useful long-term resource. Both for those of us in the gig economy, and those who need to interface with it.
Suggestions and ideas for supporting resources and activities around this are welcome. If you’re already doing something that pairs well with this, glad to create the right connections/plumbing. I’m conceiving this as just one node in a network of resources created/maintained by different people as the gig economy starts to get more self-organized.
For starters, once we have some initial content in this database, I’ll pull together a Zoom video conference for active participants to talk about where to take it and how.