No matter what you call it, Spec Work, Free Pitch, etc the concept is the same. I’ll get a handful of designers or studios to come up with a handful of concepts for my website, and the winner gets my business.

Great concept? No! There are no winners here.

What’s in it for the client? They get to pick and choose amongst mediocre designs, which you can bet your shiny crayons haven’t been well briefed or developed. Why? I hear you ask – well, why would you spend much time on the prospect of possibly getting paid down the track?

This recently happened to me – in fact, the offer was given to me, but I turned it down. Sad part of this whole affair was the prestigious nature of the prospect, who, being a university, should really know better.

Free pitching devalues your work. Why would I want to pay for your time, if you are happy to give some of it away free?

Free pitching hurts all of your clients. Someone needs to pay for your time and materials, and there is no doubt you’ll make all of your clients pay for that priviledge.

Free pitching produces crap work. You aren’t going to go through the entire scoping and discovery process, when you aren’t getting paid. Nor is the client going to spend that amount of time with five of you, knowing they will kick four of you out soon enough.

Free pitching makes the client look stupid. The client deep down knows it’s a dumb idea, just like it’d be a dumb idea to allow me to obtain a degree from them, and if the education ‘works out’, I’ll pay for it later.

Free pitching hurts the entire industry. Cowboys who are willing to ignore all sensibilities and continue to do this speculative work encourage others who aren’t as well educated to compete, by doing the same. Great! An entire industry of free workers.

Free pitching is a big sign saying ‘We’re going broke’. If a client isn’t willing to pay for your time now, why would they later? What is the actual reason they wont pay? Is it because they are teetering on implosion, or do they honestly think it’ll save them a few bucks? Do you want clients who penny pinch anyway?

Free pitches encourages less planning. Encouraging you to spend a couple of hours whipping up some pitch concepts means the client doesn’t want you to actually explore what their communication goals are, what their requirements ultimately dictate or any of that ‘boring stuff’. They just want to see the ’shiny things’ and throw all professionalism to the wind.

So, the end result of our recent ‘opportunity’? Well, alongside my own firm turning them down, there are rumours that a number of other Perth web companies did the same. Good work team – we don’t need these cowboys telling us our work is not worth charging for. Let’s pray they don’t teach their students to ask for free work.

Want to read up further on this subject? There’s a great site called No!Spec and Australian Graphic Designers Association have a great article in PDF here.

Image: Powerline & Sky.

There is a double edged sword that exists within ‘online community as a business’. On one hand, you want to do the right thing by your members/users/participants and on the other hand, you have to keep in mind the interests of stakeholders, such as staff, management and invariably, shareholders.

The recent craziness which saw Digg, every geeks favourite social bookmarking community, about face on the whole HD DVD crack code issue because of audience outrage is a fine example of the thin line you can easily cross.

Recently, the HD DVD encryption key was cracked. I’m not posting the key here, there’s a million sites you can see it on. Digg users started to post stories about it, and Digg, in their wisdom, decided that these stories broke their Terms of Use, and therefore removed the posts without warning or explanation.

Then, once the community at large realised what was happening, they rallied together by flooding the site with links to, and stories of, the HD DVD key. It got so intense, it brought Digg to its knees – not an easy task, given the amount of stories about the Digg effect on the sites that get ‘Dugg’.

What were Digg to do? Well unlike Google*, WIRED, Reddit and countless other media, search engine and other online properties who decided it wasn’t worth the risk, and ensured they were ‘crack code free’, Digg has a very large and very vocal userbase who are the contributors to all of Diggs content. Kevin Rose, Digg founder, posted on the Digg Blog to say they are caving in, and “You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.“.

So, now the users win. There is a good chance they could lose too. Their efforts in scaring Digg management into backing down from this issue means that a Copyright Infringement case may soon kick off, in which Digg could lose everything, and eventually the site, which the community hold so dear, and may end up another dot bomb casualty.

So what’s the answer? It’s a tough one. Digg is stuck between the wants of the community and the wants of their investors. I’m confident that more than one investor would now be looking at the Digg business and their lawsuit liabilities based around a bunch of random characters. It is certainly not an enviable position for anyone involved and know we’ll just have to sit back and see.

* It seems a number of people I have spoken to about thsi topic in the last day or two don’t know about the existence of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a large database of Cease and Desist notices, many of which are directed at Google. It’s a fascinating read.

Image: Styrofoam head, Little India, Singapore.