Provider Exchange Roadmap

Provider Exchange is a Laravel application for a provider-centered field-service network. The project should stay open source, avoid rate-setting, avoid payment custody in the first version, and keep reputation mutual between buyers and providers.

Current Foundation

Laravel app with Breeze authentication.
Role support for admin, provider, buyer, and hybrid users.
Seeded demo users for local testing.
Provider and buyer profile directories.
Community feed posts.
Buyer job posts and provider quote submission.
Quote revisions, quote decline flow, and quote acceptance.
Work-order creation from accepted quotes.
Work-order status transitions, messages, attachments, deliverables, and completion notes.
Configurable attachment storage policy with upload root, disk, size cap, MIME allowlist, image previews, file metadata, and deletion.
Mutual reviews with category metrics.
Peer-review disputes with comments, evidence, structured recommendations, and public vote breakdowns.
Universal community ratings for buyers, providers, job posts, work orders, and disputes.
Database notification events and notification inbox.
Starter Sanctum API surface for future app clients.
MIT license and no-payment/no-rate-setting guardrails.

Operating Principles

Providers and buyers are independent businesses.
The platform should not set, recommend, or enforce market rates.
Providers should control rate cards and terms.
Buyers should control posted offer terms.
Payment remains direct between buyer and provider unless a compliant payment partner is deliberately added later.
Reputation should be mutual, transparent, and appealable through community review.
Dispute voting is a community reputation signal, not legal adjudication.
Runtime dependencies, UI components, and themes should stay open-source friendly. Avoid proprietary theme kits, unclear asset licenses, or dependencies that would restrict commercial, nonprofit, or community scaling.

Next Build Phases

Profile depth: richer provider galleries for vans, tools, job photos, certifications, insurance, and past work; buyer galleries for company identity, logos, headers, locations, and example work; equipment/tool pickers with reusable tags; certification upload/proof records with starter certification lists; service coverage maps; and imported review summaries.
Directory quality: saved searches, better filtering, profile badges, availability signals, and stronger buyer/provider discovery pages.
Asset and storage management: configurable upload roots, file policy, attachment previews, deletion, and update-path storage link handling.
Work-order depth: checklist templates, required evidence rules, appointment windows, onsite timestamps, change-request records, and print/PDF export for work-order packets.
Reputation refinement: rating category definitions, anti-abuse controls, edit windows, report flows, and moderation views.
Dispute workflow: better evidence timelines, reason-coded votes, quorum/visibility rules, and admin/community moderation tools.
Notifications: channel preferences, email templates, and event-specific subscription controls.
API/mobile prep: token-scoped endpoints, versioned API resources, geolocation check-in groundwork, and mobile-safe work-order actions.
Import tooling: guided manual imports for Field Nation, WorkMarket, and similar profile/review history.
Competency tags and levels: provider/buyer tag taxonomies, smart-hands entry lane, specialty tags such as network, POTS, POS, AV, cabling, installer, and troubleshooter, plus earned level badges based on completed work and reputation signals.
Admin operations: audit logs, queue health, system status, content moderation, and backup/export workflows.
Deployment hardening: production environment docs, queue worker setup, scheduler setup, storage policy, and server provisioning notes.
License and runtime audit: generate and review PHP and JavaScript dependency license reports before adding external theme kits, map any risky package to a replacement, and keep required local/runtime extensions such as pdo_sqlite documented for testability.

Phase Checkpoint

Phases 1-4 have been implemented and shipped through the local -> GitHub -> ChristIT update workflow. The next active planning block is:

Reputation refinement: rating category definitions, anti-abuse controls, edit windows, report flows, and moderation views.
Dispute workflow: better evidence timelines, reason-coded votes, scope-expansion and unreachable-contact reasons, quorum/visibility rules, and admin/community moderation tools.
Notifications: channel preferences, email templates, and event-specific subscription controls.
API/mobile prep: token-scoped endpoints, versioned API resources, geolocation check-in groundwork, contact/support failure logging, and mobile-safe work-order actions.
Import tooling: guided manual imports for Field Nation, WorkMarket, and similar profile/review history.
Competency tags and levels: provider/buyer tag taxonomies, smart-hands entry lane, specialty tags such as network, POTS, POS, AV, cabling, installer, and troubleshooter, plus earned level badges based on completed work and reputation signals.

Work-order safeguards to carry into the next implementation passes:

Scope clarity: every job/work order should identify the primary objective, included work, excluded work, required tools/equipment, maximum onsite expectations, and the change-request path for out-of-scope work.
Anti-catch-all rule: long pasted instruction blocks should not be allowed to override the structured scope fields or create undefined onsite obligations.
Contact accountability: buyers should certify that primary contact, backup contact, and support/escalation channels will be reachable during the scheduled work window.
Evidence path: providers should be able to record unreachable contacts, unsupported scope expansion, and missing buyer support as structured events that can feed disputes and reviews.

Reputation safeguards to carry into Phase 5:

Keep five-star reviews as a primary readable signal.
Add transparent sub-metrics for operational behavior without replacing reviews with an opaque platform-controlled score.
Show long-term history and recent operational metrics side by side.
Separate imported marketplace history from native TSE reputation.
Require explainable formulas, provider response rights, report/appeal paths, and moderation audit trails for any composite reputation badge.

Available-work safeguards to carry into directory and job-list phases:

Available jobs should expose pay type, provider terms, schedule type, work type, rough location, buyer reliability, support/contact certification, scope clarity status, and request/quote count.
Filters should support distance, pay floor, work category, schedule type, buyer rating, scope clarity, and support availability.
Risk badges should identify broad scope, missing contact backup, missing deliverables, missing required tools, compressed schedules, and unclear closeout requirements.
Keep the primary filter bar compact: work category, coverage/radius or remote mode, keyword search, reset, and saved/advanced filters.
Model work categories as nested taxonomy records with broad families and specific specialties.
Keep every filter and table action visibly labeled or accessible to screen readers.

The July 10, 2026 Field Nation product review is captured in docs/PLATFORM_RESEARCH.md and should inform Phases 5, 8, 9, and 10 without copying private third-party work-order data into this repository.

Scaling Risks To Track

Search and filtering will need proper database indexes first, then a dedicated search service if directory/job volume grows.
Ratings and reputation pages should eventually use cached aggregates instead of recalculating averages and counts on every page view.
Notifications should move from the database queue to Redis-backed queues before high-volume alerting or email delivery.
Sessions, cache, and queues should move to Redis before running more than one web node.
Uploaded evidence, profile images, and deliverable files should move to shared or object storage before multi-server deployment.
Attachment records already track disk/path metadata, but production scaling still needs object-storage lifecycle rules, upload malware scanning, quota policy, and thumbnail generation.
Work-order timelines, dispute activity, messages, and notification tables need careful indexes before large production use.
Realtime chat, websocket presence, mobile push, and geolocation check-ins should be added as deliberate service layers instead of bolted onto normal page requests.
Background imports, image processing, moderation summaries, and reputation recalculation should run through queue workers rather than web requests.
Production deployments need explicit PHP-FPM pool, Nginx, scheduler, queue worker, backup, and log rotation documentation.

Future/Deferred

Escrow or payment custody.
Automated rate recommendations.
Native mobile apps.
Real-time chat/websocket presence.
Marketplace-wide dispute binding beyond voluntary community reputation.
Automated scraping of third-party platforms where authentication, terms, or privacy boundaries are unclear.
Automated competency promotion rules beyond transparent, reviewable tag and level signals.
Work-order template libraries for buyers and providers, including reusable sample work orders that can seed future jobs.
Broader licensed trade profiles, such as electricians, where state certification proof and trade-specific scopes can be added without hard-coding the platform around only IT technicians.

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