Great article: "The Sharing Economy" (Happy Earth Day!)

[OneGrassRoot]

(This is what I "preach" about all the time when I speak of cooperatives and cooperation, and what I hope DUers will join me in creating at Wishadoo! The US is WAY behind with this kind of thinking...)


Gorenflo is a leading proselytizer of a global trend to make sharing something far more economically significant than a primitive behavior taught in preschool. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of the social web, an entirely new generation of businesses is popping up. They enable the sharing of cars, clothes, couches, apartments, tools, meals, and even skills. The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have. Many of these sites depend on millennials disenchanted by the housing bubble and the banking crisis, or uninterested in traditional icons of success such as house or auto ownership. But the number of people who have quietly begun tapping in is impressive: Already, more than 3 million people from 235 countries have couch-surfed, while 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month. Contends Rachel Botsman, coauthor of the recently published What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption: "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership."

The evolution of the social web, explains Botsman, first enabled programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed people to share their lives (Facebook), and most recently encouraged creators to share their content (YouTube). "Now we're going into the fourth phase," says Botsman, "where people are saying, 'I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.' " The 33-year-old Brit, schooled at Oxford and Harvard, ditched her career as an innovation consultant for companies like GE and IBM. "In marketing, we spend so much money on research and understanding the consumer psyche -- and all that investment goes into selling more stuff," she explains. "I just can't help companies sell more stuff."

The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them. Botsman divides this world into three neat buckets: first, product-service systems that facilitate the sharing or renting of a product (i.e., car sharing); second, redistribution markets, which enable the re-ownership of a product (i.e., Craigslist); and third, collaborative lifestyles in which assets and skills can be shared (i.e., coworking spaces). The benefits are hard to argue -- lower costs, less waste, and the creation of global communities with neighborly values.

Full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/155/the-sharing-economy.html