It's about relationships

Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent point that at its core, the Web is really about relationships, and the most successful of these are based on trust:

The web isn't about -- or just about -- content or communication, of course. It's really about making connections -- about, well, links. But to be valued, those links must be organized around trust. In short: It's about relationships.

The greater the value of the relationship, the greater the value of those who enable those relationships. Those who figure that out succeed (and those who try to impose the old models and relationships fail): Google connects us to information at a low level with sufficient accuracy (we trust it enough) and succeeds thanks to high efficiency and high volume. eBay connects people in transactions at a higher value by creating a system of trust. Whoever uses online functionality to connect, say, employers to the right executives or homebuyers to the right homes -- replacing today's middlemen -- can bring even more value.

He even specifically discusses using the Web to manage relationships in connection with finding work:

Look at jobs. As I've said often, the new, inexpensive, efficient marketplaces where buyer and seller meet (Craig's List and Monster) replacing the old, expensive, inefficient ones (newspaper classifieds) are only a first step, a waystation on the way to a distributed future. Job listings and resumes are now popping up everywhere and anywhere online. So the next services to come along aggregate that (distribution and aggregation is the constant ebb and flow of this new world)... Makes you think that you need the aggregator of aggregators, eh? But, no, what you need to sift through this, to find value and efficiency, is trust: Relationships.

While Jarvis ponders the problem from one end - figuring out how to weed through countless aggregated relationships and establish trust - New Equities is approaching it from the other end, i.e. establishing strong trusted relationships and building the network from the grassroots up. Inherent in this network is the power to generate numerous opportunities for its members, with New Equities acting as both a mediator and an amplifier.

Consider: you probably have worked for at least five different managers thus far in your career, maybe more. So that's at least five people you know who may need to hire consultants at some point. Assuming those managers trust your judgment and recommendations, your participation in the New Equities network adds five trusted relationships with hiring managers, which can form the basis for any number of opportunities for others in the network who can provide critical skills for a variety of projects. Add to that the people you know, either currently or from past lives, who work as consultants - you probably know at least a dozen. Now multiply that by hundreds (or eventually thousands) of managers and consultants to get a sense of the power of the network.

But it's not enough to simply link people together. The missing piece is an individual who is proactively finding opportunities for members of the network and matching people to projects. In New Equities, that person is the consultant advocate, who can help connect the dots and create the trust needed to make the network effective.