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We are launching Freelancers On the Road — a new initiative to organize international freelance meetups across Europe in cooperation with local freelance communities and coworking spaces.
If you're interested in hitting the road with us more than once, you can sign up for updates by joining the core group.
The first event in the series is scheduled for September 27-28 at Coworking Cvernovka in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Attendance is free; no registration is required. Just join the Facebook event and then show up in good spirits — freelancers from all countries are welcome!
Note: This pilot event is (exceptionally) branded as the 1st Czech-Slovak international freelance meetup. Therefore, the afternoon debate will be held in Czech/Slovak, since most participants will speak these as their primary languages.
The staff at British IPSE have selected and published a collection of the best podcasts for freelancers and the self-employed. Explore and enjoy!
There’s a very comprehensive website at PrivacyTests.org with privacy ratings for internet browsers. Is your browser secure? Draw your own conclusions — and maybe switch to another.
Note: Another similar website is Secure Messaging Apps Comparison.
“Exposure to entrepreneurs (mostly) encourages entrepreneurship,” explains Matt Clancy in his older evidence-based article accompanied by a podcast episode titled Entrepreneurship is contagious.
Citing several studies, Matt comes to a conclusion that aligns with our regular observations in our work with freelancers — being around other independent professionals makes one think about career choices and more likely to choose the freelance way.
This is big: The EU is proposing a new legislation called the Platform Workers Directive, which could compel some freelance platforms to reclassify gig workers as employees if they fail to treat them as genuinely independent professionals.
According to The Freelance Informer, which cites Osborne Clarke, this will be judged by several criteria:
The proposed regulation also delves into other facets of platform work, like the application of automation and algorithms for evaluating individuals, their performance, visibility, and more.
Our take: We recognize that the gig economy (primarily platform-based and digital) and the freelance economy (consisting of more or less independent individuals, mostly outside online platforms) are not the same thing and only overlap each other. The new legislation actually tries to make the same distinction, which is a good thing.
We recently featured two best-of app collections for freelancers put together by Austin Church and Jan Onesork. If you find these lists helpful, there’s also a toolkit of 80+ Great Tools for Freelancers published in 2021 by our friends at Freelance Business Community. Enjoy!
We love TV shows where the main character is an independent professional. One of the best recent examples is The Lincoln Lawyer, based on the best-selling novels by Michael Connelly and produced by Netflix. Its protagonist, Mickey Haller, famously runs his business out of a Lincoln limousine, although this is somewhat muted in the TV version. After only two seasons, the leading actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is already on the verge of becoming a major movie star.
Fun fact: There’s also a 2011 movie The Lincoln Lawyer starring Matthew McConaughey.
Freelancers are so resourceful and creative! Just take a look at the infographic drawn in real time by US-based visual artist Katya Balakina during Robert Vlach’s Game Changers masterclass yesterday…
Many thanks to Katya, and to Elina Jutelyte of the Freelance Business Community and Úna Herlihy & Peter McPartlin of The Indie List for co-organizing this one-off pro-bono online event 🙏
Austin Church of Freelance Cake has compiled and published a comprehensive list of the best tools for freelancers based on his own experience with these apps. It’s a pretty extensive stack, and there are definitely some great picks you might not know about.
Note: Once again, a notable dominance of Google’s online office over Microsoft Office among freelancers. It’s quite the opposite in the corporate sector.
Tip: A similar list of top freelance apps and tools was published earlier this year by our member Jan Onesork.
A newly released survey Freelancer Study 2023 produced by Freelancermap (an international freelance platform based in Germany) offers some interesting insights into how much freelancers earn in the rich world — mostly in the EU.
The data collected from 3,504 freelancers are not statistically representative of the wider freelance economy (80% of the respondents have a degree or some higher education, 75% are senior experts, 63% work in tech, consulting or management). Still, the results are impressive.
Here are some highlights:
Check out the full PDF report for details.