/// FAQ DATABASE

It draws the next fifty-two weeks, one tick per week, running down the right-hand margin of every page. The length of each tick is the share of the people currently on screen who are still committed in that week. A long tick means nobody is free. A short stub means everybody is.

The single red tick is the crossing — the first week the group you are looking at opens up. On a profile page the rail narrows to one person and shows that person's year.

Filter the roster by discipline and the rail redraws. That is deliberate: picking a discipline is a question about capacity, not a request to shorten a list.

No. Enquiries go to the person directly and the contract is between you and them. Nothing is routed through us and no percentage is taken.

This matters more than it sounds. A directory that takes a cut has an incentive to hide the rate and to keep you inside its messaging system. This one shows the day rate on the card.

They apply, and the work is reviewed against a single question: would we hire them ourselves for the discipline they applied under. Roughly one in five applications gets listed.

Listings are not paid. There is no featured placement and no way to buy a higher position, because the sort order is capacity and capacity is not for sale.

Everyone on the roster confirms their capacity every fortnight. A profile that goes three cycles without a confirmation is hidden rather than shown with an old date, because a wrong availability is worse than no availability.

The rail reads the same numbers the profiles do. There is no second source that can drift out of step with it.

The figure on a card is what that person charges for a standard day of project work. It is a real number, not a starting position, and most people on the roster will tell you the same if you ask.

What does move is the shape of the engagement. Three days a week over four months usually prices differently from five days a week over three weeks, and a fixed-scope block prices differently again. Ask about the shape, not the discount.

Most of the roster works remotely as a default and has done for years. Time zone matters less than overlap — four shared hours a day is enough for almost any project, and everyone listed states the hours they keep.

If you need somebody physically in the room for a workshop or a research session, say so in the enquiry. Several people on the roster travel for that and price it separately.

Yes, and it is common — a designer and a front-end developer is the usual pair, sometimes with a researcher at the front.

Filter to each discipline in turn and read the crossing week on the rail. If the two crossings are eight weeks apart, you have a sequencing problem to solve before you have a hiring problem, and it is much cheaper to find that out now.

Tell us. We are not a party to the contract and we cannot arbitrate it, but we do read every report and we do remove people from the roster over a pattern.

The honest version: a directory without a commission has no financial hold over the people it lists. What it has is the listing itself, and for most freelancers that is enough.