yours2share - sharing stuff & collaborative consumption » environment

In transition: Rob Hopkins

sophie — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:57:08 +0000

Last night I went to Transition Norwich’s third birthday celebration to hear Rob Hopkins of the Transition Network speak. He’s a very good speaker and the messages were clear:

Sustainability makes sense, however you look at the future
Work towards sustainabiity and resilience improves
The route to sustainability is different for each community
The best way to work out how to make it work is to try things out and find out what works for your community
There are many aspects to sustainability: reducing energy use, local food, local currencies, community building, developing skills, co-housing

Rob Hopkins has written several books about transition towns and how to start, the latest is The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times . I’m waiting for my copy to arrive, I’ll review it here in a week or two.

TechCrunch meets Collaborative Consumption

sophie — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:25:23 +0000

Interesting interview of Lauren Anderson, Innovation Director at Collaborative Consumption, a hub dedicated to swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting, by Andrew Keen of TechCrunch, a high tech magazine website, as she explains why collaborative consumption could be as significant as the Industrial Revolution.

Facebook – sharing websites

sophie — Wed, 25 May 2011 16:23:33 +0000

I’m developing a list of all the websites related to sharing I know about on yours2share’s Facebook page. As you’ll see sharing and collaboration take many forms including:

private syndicates
peer to peer rental
rental
swapping
getting rid of stuff that is no longer wanted
peer to peer lending

This is a work in progress. If you know of a service that isn’t mentioned, please let me know.

Another way of sharing the big stuff

sophie — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 09:36:37 +0000

I’ve just posted another entry “Another way of sharing the big stuff“ on the Shareable website, a follow on from a piece I wrote last month called “How to share the big stuff“

Landshare partners Shared Earth

sophie — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:07:54 +0000

Last week Landshare announced that it is partnering with its US counterpart Shared Earth. The American site will use Landshare’s technology platform, but keep its name unchanged. This moves Landshare into its third country, there is already a Landshare Australia.

I’m pleased to see the landsharing movement growing rapidly. yours2share also helps people share land for growing fruit and vegetables, or keeping livestock, horses or any other use. There is some good guidance here to help people set up the arrangement.

What’s mine is yours

sophie — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:21:52 +0000

I’ve just finished reading “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It’s thought-provoking and highly readable. Many of its peers are the former, but rarely the latter, and for this reason I’ll admit that I was putting off reading it, even though it’s a must-read for me. So I was pleasantly surprised when I read it cover to cover in a day: couldn’t put it down.

What distinguishes it from so many earnest tomes telling us to reduce waste, reduce consumption, be good and wear a hairshirt, is that it understands that this revolution has to be lead by consumer demand and great design, and that excellent profits are there to be made by companies who understand this. Given the enormity of the issues facing our planet, it is also hugely optimistic.

It lays out the context for the need for change: why we’re in this un-sustainable mess and why it doesn’t need to be this way. Then it leads you through the major ways we can reduce consumption:

product service systems – such as car clubs like Zipcar and ridesharing like Liftshare
redistribution markets – such as ebay, freecycle and swapping sites like swishing
collaborative lifestyles – co-working (such as Jelly), finance (such as Zopa) and websites like landshare, parkatmyhouse and yours2share.

I found the sections on trust particularly useful and I’m waiting to see the first reputation platform emerge, bringing together our reputations on ebay, zopa, couchsurfing, relayrides etc. Ironically the only area of sharing that wasn’t really covered was the creation of private syndicates and sharing of large assets between small groups of private individuals similar to the sharing enabled by yours2share.

If you want to do your bit for the planet, understand the part that a large chunk of the internet plays in this, or find out where your company should be heading, it’s well worth reading.

How to share the big stuff

sophie — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:05:33 +0000

I’ve just added a post to Shareable.net’s excellent website about every aspect of sharing. It is an introductory piece explaining the basics issues to be discussed when you are creating a new private syndicate, called How to share the big stuff.

Andy Sirkin on fractional ownership

sophie — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:11:53 +0000

Andy Sirkin, one of the world’s legal experts on sharing, gives his views on fractional ownership. I couldn’t agree more.

One of the most important points he makes is the importance of the contract. The people who need a contract are usually those who don’t have one. Simply discussing the arrangement sufficiently to write a contract usually means everything has been thought through, understood and agreed. In these cases, the contract is often put in a drawer and never needed again. And that’s just how it should be.

On yours2share there is plenty of guidance on setting up a sharing arrangement and template contracts to help you get started in your discussions. Then get professional legal advice to check it all through.

The Economist sharing?

sophie — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:37:42 +0000

I was delighted to read about The Business of Sharing in the latest edition of the Economist. There have been several mentions of various sharing ideas recently in the newspaper, but this is the first time I’ve seen a longer look at the subject.

I’m also delighted to see its last sentence:

The internet may be synonymous with novelty, but by encouraging people to reuse the same objects rather than buy new ones, it may revive the old virtue of building products that last.

Maybe at last the concepts of sharing will begin to permeate the mainstream.

Sharing law

sophie — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:25:32 +0000

I recently found a couple of great posts on Shareable.net by Janelle Orsi about how greater sharing will need changes to the law. Lawyers will also need to develop the contacts and frameworks for many aspects of sharing.

The first piece is called the birth of sharing law and examines the wide range of sharing initiatives that people are now trying out. As these become increasingly mainstream, some will definitely require some amendments to the law. The second article looks at some specific areas that lawyers are examining, particularly things like:

how to get small amounts of funding from large numbers of people, say 200 people investing $100 in a cafe, without needing to go through a complicated compliance process
how to handle the taxation of bartering
how landsharing works on a large scale
who is the employer and who is the employee in a worker-owned co-op

So far, goodwill, sensible discussion before starting to share, and the small scale of sharing means has been little litigation. But as the sharing concept grows, the laws and contracts governing the arrangements need to evolve. I think they will.