Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine dedicated to promoting sharing as an empowering lifestyle and effective social change strategy. We engage in research and promotion of innovations that help citizens share as part of our work. With our partner Latitude Research, we recently launched a survey on the new sharing economy.
We hope to discuss the results of the survey at the SXSW Interactive conference next March in a panel entitled, The New Sharing Economy, and identify the obstacles and opportunities to creating a way of life based on sharing supported by innovative businesses.
Acceptance of our panel counts partly on popular support in a voting system managed by SXSW’s PanelPicker system. If you support our cause, please vote for our panel at this link (persevere dear friend, you will have to register to vote!):
And share the below message on your social media of choice (will fit in a Twitter update):
Please vote for Shareable’s SXSW panel on The Sharing Economy: http://bit.ly/bq9rV5 Panel will share info to help sharing startups grow.
I hope you’ll support this important work. We believe that sharing is one of the best ways to enjoy life and overcome the economic and environmental challenges we face.
Here’s the esteemed panelists that will be joining me at SXSW:
Micki Krimmel, founder and CEO of Neighborgoods.net, a service that enables neighbors to share their stuff.
John Zimmer, co-founder and COO of Zimride.com, a leading ridesharing service.
Rachel Botsman, author of “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” and a consultant in the sharing industry.
Aaron Freed, founder and CEO of Divvy.com, a service that allows you to create your own sharing service for just about anything including houses, planes, cars, and much more.
Kim Gaskins, Director of Content Development at Latitude Research and producer of the first ever (we think) Sharing Industry Survey.
Header image courtesy of alossix, (cc) some rights reserved.
To participate in The New Sharing Economy study, click here.
Sharing is a means to build community, to distribute (and then re-distribute) the resources we need more efficiently, and to tread more lightly on our environment. Sharing is also a flourishing industry that’s accomplished an incredible amount, but is really just getting started.
Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research are co-launching the first ever (to our knowledge!) comprehensive sharing industry study. We hope to learn how people understand sharing at a time when innovative Web platforms and local communities–new technologies and psychologies–are continually expanding what sharing can mean, connecting people to each other (and people to things) in ever-more intelligent ways. The study will assess individuals’ awareness of current shared offerings, their attitudes about sharing and trust, and their engagement with sharing across a variety of contexts. Participants will be contributing to a relatively new and increasingly important knowledge base. Moreover, they will be playing a critical role in helping to generate new ideas and opportunities for the future of sharing. (Results will be shared on both Shareable.net and life-connected.com in the coming weeks.)
We’d love if you could take 15-20 minutes to answer a questionnaire about your feelings toward and experiences with sharing. To take the survey, click here.
Each participant will receive $10 as thanks for his or her time and thoughtful contribution.
(At the end of the survey, participants can opt to receive their $10 as an Amazon gift card or, alternatively, they can choose to donate it towards one of two great causes that support sharing and community-building: Creative Commons or Project for Public Spaces). Latitude’s open innovation privacy policy is available here.
From an early age, we’re conditioned to think of sharing as having limited applications–as an oft-inconvenient social expectation. But something is changing about the world: something significant and pervasive, with seemingly unbounded potential. Advancements in technology (especially mobile and real-time technologies) are enabling new kinds of sharing amongst diverse networks of people, often over broad distances. And a new collective psychology is fizzling up: one which intuitively favors trust over skepticism of others, and one which builds influential communities from the bottom-up.
Today, sharing offers material benefits that can significantly improve the lives of individuals. I can now make money by selling the things I don’t need anymore on eBay (or by renting out items I don’t need all the time on Rentalic) to someone else who does need them. As it happens, I’ve saved the environment from the pollution that goes along with manufacturing more products. (I’ve also probably saved the buyer or renter some money, too.)
Through “possession-on-demand” services like Bag Borrow or Steal (formerly Avelle), I can access luxury or hard-to-find products that might’ve been previously unavailable to me. And I can save money by shedding the high cost of owning and maintaining my own vehicle; instead, I can drive less, walk more, and access a car only when I need one (through Zipcar, RelayRides, and other car-sharing programs).
In addition to physical objects like cars and clothing, it’s possible to share information, money, time, physical spaces–even agriculture–with people I might not already know. I can join a community garden or yard-sharing community to access fresh, local produce, spend time on a relaxing hobby, and make new friends in my community.
When you stop to consider, most things are shareable in one way or another, but what and exactly how we might share isn’t always clear. “It’s true that sharing is a relatively simple concept and a basic part of human life,” explains Janelle Orsi. “What’s new is that people are applying sharing in innovative and far-reaching ways, many of which require complex planning, new ways of thinking and organizing, and new technologies. In short, people are taking sharing to new levels, ranging from relatively simple applications of sharing to community-wide sharing initiatives — and beyond.”
To participate in “The New Sharing Economy” study by Latitude Research and Shareable.net, click here.
Latitude is an international research consultancy exploring how Web technologies can enhance human experiences; our people-driven research approach unites generative, media-based methods with robust quantitative analysis to identify future opportunities for Web-based innovation. Latitude’s 42s are a series of open innovation studies covering diverse topics, unified by a common digital thread, which address everyday problems of great personal and societal relevance. Visit life-connected.com for other 42s, or email Neela Sakaria (nsakaria@latd.com) to learn more about working with Latitude.
About Shareable.net: Shareable is a non-profit online magazine which explores how to design our streets, cities, workplaces, institutions, government, and technology so that people can share lives and resources. They tell this story because they believe that a shareable world might be just want we need to enjoy life to the fullest—and restore the planet in the process.
About Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. Creative Commons exists entirely because our users, advocates, and supporters contribute to its success.
About Project for Public Spaces: Project for Public Spaces is a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. They have completed projects in over 2500 communities in 40 countries and all 50 US states. Partnering with public and private organizations, federal, state and municipal agencies, business improvement districts, neighborhood associations and other civic groups, PPS improves communities by fostering successful public spaces.
Header image courtesy of katmere’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.
Last week, outside my local cafe in Cambridge, MA (Central Square), I quite literally stumbled upon “The Stranger Exchange,” a kind of physical, hyperlocal lovechild of Freecycle and PostSecret (a crowdsourced, “sharing” Craigslist + an anomymous community art project, that is).
Here’s how it works:
The wonderful irony is that the creator of The Stranger Exchange opted to repurpose an abandoned newspaper box for his project, borrowing from a number of themes in new and evolving media–crowdsourcing, a sense of personal narrative, and a renewed interest in hyperlocal surroundings (and physical spaces in general, via the rise of mobile).
Here’s what to put in it:
These are a few of the suggestions for items to leave, as posted on Pandora’s the box’s front window.
Books, movies, old pictures, new pictures, report cards, post cards, love letters, rumors, business cards, questions, answers, origami, keys to nowhere, coupons, dirty looks, self-portraits, surprises, etc.
Brought to you by: new notions of community cohesiveness
Admittedly, I was hesitant to open the box (its window being opaque), but this is what I found:
Not only were there things in the box but, the next day, its things weren’t missing; in fact, they were different.
The social implications surrounding pervasive digital connectivity–the way we form new relations (often moving fluidly from virtual to physical worlds), engender community cohesiveness even across far-distant locales, and feel that we exist independent of our physical selves–suggests a kind of unspoken credo governing theft and equal [stranger] exchange.
“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark [Craigslist's eponym] says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves.
A new sharing economy seems to be springing up–an understanding that continuous access to non-rival goods (like information) is just as satisfying as owning them, and that we can intelligently manage access needs for rival goods (like physical objects); that is, we needn’t buy DVDs if Netflix serves them up on demand, and we needn’t buy cars if we can find them waiting at a nearby Zipcar lot anytime we need them. In a similar vein, we can crowdsource needs for physical objects via community exchange programs like Freecycle.
The Stranger Exchange isn’t branded as a Freecycle, but its online forum (just begun) gives it potential to develop organically into something like this, with a fixed, hyperlocal drop point.
For now, The Stranger Exchange looks to be a microcosmic example of social & physical discovery through sharing and community-based, [anomymous] storytelling (the latter being a desire to hurl impactful tidbits of one’s personal narrative, unattached–all the more impactful because of their dissociation with a quantifiable, single persona–into the vast expanse of connected space, and to hope that they resonate with others, if not outright echo back).
Are there any other great projects out there in this vein, somewhere along the physical-digital spectrum?
Contesting the Crowdsourcing in Netflix’s Competition
Recently, Netflix engineered a “crowdsourcing” competition, awarding $1 million to the contestant who could make the company’s existing movie recommendation engine 10% more accurate.
There’s also been a lot of hullabaloo over the term “crowdsourcing.” Netflix didn’t crowdsource; running a generative idea contest within the software development community, if PR-catchy, doesn’t constitute the outsourcing of one task to a large number of potential contributors.
Likewise, crowdSPRING (left) brands itself as a crowdsourced “marketplace for creative services,” but ultimately allows for the selection of one option, sprung from a non-collaborative world of ideas.
(Not to get down on Netflix– we love what they, and other, shared service providers like Zipcar are doing to encourage “the new sharing economy.”)
What’s the Value of Crowdsourcing, if Such a Thing Even Exists?
Recently, I came across a snarky Forbes article compiled by a crowdsourcing near-nihilist, Dan Woods, entitled “The Myth of Crowdsourcing.” With respect to Netflix, he was right in that any late-stage pooling between teams seemed more interdisciplinary collaboration than crowdsourcing (crowdsourcing by the company was well out the window); innovations appeared, more or less, to be “aggregations of the inventions of individual virtuosos.”
But what we consider to be truths (and virtues) of crowdsourcing, the author refused to give due credence across scenarios:
1. “General” crowds can provide more compelling results than specially talented individuals.
“Whatever term we use, let’s not call it crowdsourcing and pretend that 10,000 average Joes invent better products than Steve Jobs.”
Dan Woods for Forbes, “The Myth of Crowdsourcing.”
We see the answer to this in the aggregation and layering of “average” contributions. Per Yochai Benkler, the NASA Clickworker’s program had 85,000 users voluntarily visit a Web site where they could mark or classify craters on Mars, the aggregate results of which effectively created a heat map “virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters.”
Truly “general” crowdsourcing works with repetition in mind; it harnesses the wisdom of many (or, a few minutes from 85,000 average Joes to replicate the long labor of a highly skilled NASA worker). More popularly, Wikipedia creates a [less visually trended] refinement of content through the work of thousands of contributors, self-selected from the general Internet populace.
2. “Crowds” can be composed of many talented individuals, rather than reliant on one “individual virtuoso.”
“There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field [...]. Yes, there are large teams of developers on open-source projects, but without the virtuoso contribution at the outset, they would achieve nothing.”
Dan Woods for Forbes, “The Myth of Crowdsourcing.”
Woods’ philosophy of collaborative communities and crowdsourcing acknowledges two types of individuals–individual virtuosos and average Joes.
Why can’t there be an organically-formed crowd of virtuosos? Or niche topic “savants”? The most successfully crowdsourced initiatives allow for individuals to volunteer for tasks, and to self-determine the size and nature of their contributions within the confines of the project.
For tasks where monetary rewards aren’t prominent (or for individuals not much motivated by monetary rewards), participation in a crowdsourced activity is largely mediated by intrinsic (i.e. “just because it’s interesting”) and social-psychological rewards (perception by others, personal satisfaction)–so it’s no wonder that “crowds,” as they’re popularly required for crowdsourcing, tend toward “leader” communities.
Yochai Benkler & Resources on Crowdsourcing
For more on crowdsourcing, the open-source movement, and the dynamics of collaborative communities, check out Yochai Benkler‘s TED talk below on “The New Open-Source Economics.” The presentation just brushes on topics covered in his free, 79-page PDF, “Coase’s Penguin” (a selection from the Yale Law Journal, written in 2002 and eerily on target). Benkler also wrote The Wealth of Networks, published in 2007.
Given the increasing semantic flexibility of the word “crowdsourcing” (and the occasional denial of its existence), we still think it’s an impactful utility and a curious innovative, social phenomenon.
Header image courtesy of editor’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.
Not only were there things in the box but, the next day, its things weren’t missing; in fact, they were different.
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