yours2share - blog about fractional ownership & fractional rent

Eco sites & sharing

sophie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:13:47 +0000

A couple more interesting websites have popped into the yours2share inbox in the last few days and I thought I’d share them with you.

Firstly there is Collaborative Consumption which is publicising the imminent arrival of a new book about sharing and the ways in which people share stuff. The other website is Ecoboom, a friendly website that helps you work just what you can do to become a bit more sustainable.

Eco Chic

sophie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:11:32 +0000

Eco Chic followed me on Twitter earlier today and, as you do, I went to see who they are. I’m delighted to see an eco friendly website that doesn’t perpetually ram home the cycling, recycling, hair shirt existence (I know this isn’t fair, but sometimes it can feel that way). You can enjoy the good things in life as well as have consideration for the environment. I think Eco Cic and yours2share have this ethos in common.

Whilst second homes and yachts are usually an anathema to environmentalists, perhaps yours2share can help ensure that at least they are used for often, and not left empty most of the time.

Floating offices

sophie — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:08:49 +0000

Not a straightforward sharing proposition, but these novel floating offices could enable people to make much greater use of marina space. And what a great place to have an office.

I’m busily working on my new office for yours2share at the moment and offices with a great view are close to my heart. Fortunately yours2share’s new office overlooks a very pretty garden: I’m looking forward to moving in.

Meet me @ WREF

sophie — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:18:59 +0000

yours2share is taking a stand at the WREF (Women, Research and Enterprise Forum) Showcase being held at the Forum in Norwich on Wednesday 17th March from 10am til 4pm.

The Showcase is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, held in collaboration with the National Science and Engineering Week and the John Innes Centenary.

If you’d like to find out more about yours2share, come and see us there.

FT tries boat sharing

sophie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:27:58 +0000

Whenever I’ve spoken to the Financial Times, or other publications aimed at people earning higher salaries, about yours2share and sharing in general, I’ve tended to get a fairly sniffy response. Either they think their readers would only consider buying outright, or they immediately mentally file all sharing as timeshare.

So I was surprised to see this piece by Richard Donkin last week “How to share a sailboat“. Well done to Sailtime, about whom the article is written, for getting the FT to listen. Richard explains how he spent a day with Sailtime finding out how the system works.

John Bostock, managing director of the SailTime Dorset franchise sums the advantages up well:

“We find that as members are sharing the same boat each time they come, they want to look after it,” says Bostock. “We think the system is right for its time. You can go into any marina in the world and you will see boats that will rarely move from their moorings week in week out. This is about making the most of the boats.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Weird stuff

sophie — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:38:45 +0000

This post Why Our Bright Green Futures Will Be Weirder Than We Think on the WorldChanging website makes interesting reading.

….I’ve often paraphrased Bucky Fuller that we shouldn’t aim for beautiful solutions, but if our solutions aren’t beautiful once we’ve found them, they’re probably not fully developed. Now I think as well that if our solutions aren’t really weird, they’re probably not ambitious enough.

So we are looking for beautiful weird solutions, that appeals to me. Maybe a little sharing would help too.

Facebook Fans

sophie — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:26:38 +0000

After much fiddling last night, I managed to get the Facebook fan box into the widget on my blog. So now you can sign up to be a fan of the yours2share page on Facebook. Please do!

Just click “Become a fan”.

Facebook has improved greatly recently, it used to drive me mad every time I touched it. You’d see something one day, go back the next and find it impossible to get back to that interesting section. I’ve not had that sensation for about six months, but yesterday as I was amending the page, I saw the link to the fan box. I did a little more work on the page, and went back to find the Fan Box. I went round and round in circles.

In the end I Googled and found this great explanation of how to set up the Fan Box. The link I was looking for was buried in the page.

More about sharing cabs

sophie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:02:56 +0000

I posted a couple of weeks ago about how I shared taxis in south west London many years ago, prompted by a post on the Sharing Solution. Shareable.net has a further post about taxis sharing and mentions an iphone application called ridepenguin which is designed to enable this. Great step forward. So far it is only based in Seattle and Las Vegas, but I hope this rolls out quickly. I can see even “I never share anything” City folks using this in London when it’s raining and cabs are like gold dust.

Car sharing and car clubs

sophie — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:50:09 +0000

I’ve blogged before about shared ownership of cars and car clubs, but saw these articles on shareable.net: How to share a car, part 1 and How to share a car part 2. The articles are written by Janelle Orsi the author of a new book The Sharing Solution. The first part broadly covers car clubs, in the UK these are operated by companies like Zipcar, Connect by Hertz and CityCarClub. The second part covers informal car clubs, where a small group (say two to six) private individuals own a car. I’m pleases that , wrote these articles cover this, because I think this is a great way forward, particularly for rural and small town commnities where the major car clubs are unlikely to operate, and where there are often severe transport issues. However few people appear to even cosider owning a car with people who live nearby. Part 2 also covers carpooling or liftsharing: in the UK the major operator is Liftshare.

Another great source of information about car sharing is Carplus and this recent report by Frost and Sullivan on the sustainable potential of carsharing is worth a read.

yours2share has some great guidance on car clubs and car sharing and here are the current car sharing listings

Sharing, community and quality of life

sophie — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:01:17 +0000

When I started yours2share, I didn’t realise that I was starting a social enterprise, I just wanted to help people share stuff. As the number of private syndicates that were helped by yours2share increased, I also became aware that if as the number of partners in a private syndicates increases substantially, it becomes a co-operative.

Over time yours2share has created a well established forum for people sharing property, boats and aircraft. It also enables people to share land, gardens and allotments, for food and vegetables as well as animals such as hens, goats, horses, and bees. We’ve also helped people to share cars as informal car clubs: buying a car between three and six people in a street or village. The principles of sharing, the issues that must be agreed to make a sharing arrangment work are basically the same, whether you are sharing a £1 million yacht or a vegetable plot at the end of the garden.

The last year I moved to a small town in south Norfolk, a rural corner of East Anglia and I’ve become immersed in a rural lifestyle and economy. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using the social networks much more, particularly Twitter, and all of the strands of yours2share and my lives, seem to have come together in the guise of the Plunkett Foundation and various projects in which it is involved.

The Plunkett Foundation promotes and supports co-operatives and social enterprises in rural communities worldwide. One of the Plunkett Foundation’s projects is the lottery funded MakeLocalFoodWork, where it works with a range of other major partners including Co-operativesUK, the trade association for all types of co-operative enterprise throughout the UK, and the Soil Association which works to improve the public’s understanding of the impact of different methods of food production on health and the environment.

The MakeLocalFoodWork project is a collection of projects all designed to ‘reconnect people and land through local food increasing access to fresh, healthy, local food with clear, traceable origins’.

If you want to know more about supporting rural communities, do visit the Plunkett Foundation’s website, and if food issues interest you, have a look at the MakeLocalFoodWork website.

If you just want somewhere to “grow your own” or would like someone to help you to make use of your garden, here are yours2share’s landshare listings and landshare guidance.