I asked Social Innovator Rachel Botsman whose thinking I admire, to write a guest post for swissmiss. I was thrilled that she immediately agreed. Check out collaborativeconsumption.com for information about her upcoming book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption and the growing movement.
Collaborative Consumption: Reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.
Guest Post by Rachel Botsman
A couple of years ago I started to notice instead of friends bragging about their new Prius, they boasted how they had given up their cars altogether by becoming “Zipsters” (members of the car-sharing service Zipcar). More and more people were selling stuff on craigslist and eBay, swapping books, DVDs, and games on sites such as Swaptree, and giving unwanted items away on Freecycle. Local sharing platforms such as NeighborGoods and Share Some Sugar started popping up alongside a whole range of peer-to-peer rental services such as RelayRides and Zilok. On a trip to Denver, I saw cyclists pedaling around on bright red bikes with the word B-Cycle on their crossbars. A friend in London told me about her new favorite Channel 4 TV program called Landshare (a garden ‘dating agency’ connecting growers to people with land to share). I kept hearing about people joining some kind of collective or co-op, from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs to Etsy Labs. Magazines, blogs and journals brimmed with popular articles from the self-organizing behavior of ants to “Coworking: Solo But Not Alone”. Whether it was ‘peer-to-peer,’ to the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to ‘smart mobs’ to ‘flashmobs’ to ‘prosumption’ to ‘crowdsourcing’, numerous sticky ideas were emerging on how easy it is to form groups, pods, packs, hubs or whatever you want to call them, and the might of communities. From the election of President Obama to Elinor Ostrom winning the Nobel Prize for Economics to the infamous Wikipedia; all highlighted what the old adage “power in numbers” can achieve. And of course everyday I was bombarded with stats and stories about the growth of the online social revolution. Co-everything was everywhere.
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