Charlies’ tiny movements have started me thinking about free. Specifically, free work.

It’s an interesting set of variables: do you work unpaid to bootstrap something, and hold out for when things get good again? Or do you hold out for the kind of work where you can take a buck from everything you do? Perhaps naively, I’m convinced that unpaid work is fine, at least under the following circumstances:

1) You’re going freelance and building up a practice
2) You own stock in the project
3) You believe in it, there’s no way it can make money, and you can ensure your economic survival another way.

But then I spent yesterday evening with a brilliant IT consultant, a bit of a guru with SEO, Adsense and all kinds of stuff that are not really my area of expertise. Though he’s full-time in another company, he’d found our site accidentally and (when we showed him the beta) got interested. And now he wants to help us, with all kinds of stuff we’d need to pay an IT consultant for. For no money.

At Burning Man, I was struck by the way experience depends not on what you’re able to pay, but on what you can give away - in the sense of physical stuff, but also of friendliness, high energy and the like. And now I’m wondering whether, on the internet, some similar rule applies. Maybe, like people at Burning Man, people who are online a lot are likely to be focusing on stuff further up Maslow’s pyramid of needs than basic survival. And so the social dynamic responds to abundance by becoming a gift economy. Perhaps thinking ‘What’s in it for me?’ isn’t always appropriate.

I’ve done plenty of free work. Maybe I feel vindicated by experiencing that in reverse for a change. Or again, perhaps this kind of voluntarism isn’t really work. But it did start me thinking that perhaps there’s a fourth reason to do work for people for no money: because you can.