Sharing Is Good: How to Save Money, Time and Resources Through Collaborative Consumption (5 page)

The PLENTY in Pittsboro, North Carolina, is an alternative

currency created back in 2002. The paper currency is available in denominations of $1 through $50 that can be used to pay for goods from dozens of participating businesses. Right now, that list includes everything from a wireless company to marriage counselors.

PLENTY (Piedmont Local EcoNomy Tender) currency can also

be exchanged for dollars through the locally owned Capital Bank

to help keep them circulating regularly. In the decade since the first PLENTY currency was issued, participants have noticed that benefits aren’t limited to savings or profit. “Members seek each other out, meet face-to-face, and get to know their neighbors,” reads the PLENTY website, www.theplenty.org. “The PLENTY allows the

‘small town values’ of neighborliness, generosity and self-reliance to blend with our community’s traditional support for diversity, social justice, and responsible development.”

Ithaca Hours, created in Ithaca, New York in 1991, adds a twist

to the local currency concept by incorporating time as part of value.

Ithaca Hours can be purchased at the local Alternatives Federal

Credit Union (AFCU) or at any local business that accepts it as currency. One Ithaca Hour costs $10.00 — or one hour of basic labor.

In the twenty or so years since Ithaca Hours have been in circulation, smaller denominations have been added (half Hour = $5.00,

quarter Hour = $2.50) and the bills now bear the signatures of both the Hours President Steve Burke and the president of AFCU. Since

its start, several million dollars worth of Hours have been exchanged among thousands of residents and over 500 area businesses, including the Cayuga Medical Center, the public library, many local 14

Sharing is Good

farmers, movie theatres, restaurants, healers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, landlords, and the AFCU itself.

And that’s just focusing on the United States. LETS (Local

Exchange Trading System) is a mutual credit currency that makes

electronic currency available as it is needed in the form of ATM cards.

There are over 2,500 LETS networks around the world, primarily in Europe and Canada. Another currency, Salt Spring Dollars, emerged in the Canadian Gulf Islands as a printed currency that is 100% ex-changeable with Canadian dollars.

The WIR Bank was founded by Swiss businessmen so they could

do business with one another, interest-free, during the Depression.

WIR Bank functions without scrip; it exists only as a bookkeeping system to facilitate transactions. It is still in operation, and over one fourth of all Swiss business is conducted through the WIR bank. Its use tends to increase when the conventional economy falters (with high unemployment and recession), and it diminishes when the traditional economy is booming. Thus, it acts as a steadying force and is one of the factors that make the Swiss economy so stable.

Japan has developed over 600 operational complementary cur-

rencies in an attempt to address socio economic problems stemming from more than a decade of recession. For example, Tsutomo Hotta, Japan’s “Mr. Moral Authority,” developed “Fureai Kippu,” a complementary currency used to care for the elderly. Older people receive credits for time, which they can use to receive care from local citizens.

The credits are used to pay for things Japan’s national insurance does not cover. The Fureai Kippu system helps communities create relationships based on taking time to care for elderly citizens. When surveyed, older citizens said they actually prefer receiving care from local, un-trained people rather than from professional healthcare workers.

Where Are We Now?

We learned early in our existence that cooperating improved our quality of life and often prolonged our survival. Successful cooperation

History of Sharing

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was valued among early societies, encouraging individuals to behave in such a way that was beneficial to the entire community. This natural inclination to work together for mutual benefit gradually evolved into the original barter system. Through simple barters, people

could trade items of value to obtain things that they needed. As

long as human demands remained relatively simple, a “coincidence

of wants” was easy to generate: “You have a thing that I need, I have a thing that you need, let’s trade!” As we moved from hunter-gatherer societies to established agrarian societies, cattle emerged as an early bartering currency, with certain types or numbers of cattle corresponding to common needs. As the population expanded and needs

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Sharing is Good

became more complex, it became harder to organize double and tri-

ple coincidences of wants. Eventually, people needed a standard type of currency with agreed-upon value that was easier to carry around than a cow. Many different objects were utilized at some point, including seashells, beads, and grain. These early currencies teach us an important lesson about money and value, namely, that currency

only has value if we say it does. Taking this idea a step further, we can see that anything has the potential to serve as currency as long as enough people agree on its value and accept it as a form of trade.

In modern times, people exploited this concept of value to bolster local economies through alternative and complementary currencies.

The widespread success of these alternative currencies created interest around opting out of current economic systems. Fast-forward to current day, and some people have begun to wonder if we really need to mess around with “units of value” at all.

Enter the modern collaborative consumption movement, also re-

ferred to as the “sharing economy.” It’s based on the principle that the world already contains all of the supplies and resources we need to survive. It’s just that many of these resources are sitting idle, wasted, or hoarded by those who feel they’re entitled to more than their fair share. Whereas in the past, sharing or cooperative behaviors have been best executed within limited communities, the boom in mobile technologies and social networking we are experiencing today makes it possible to scale up the system and make something new.

The New Sharing Economy

While the vast majority of commentary on the sharing economy has

focused on how to fit collaborative consumption into the current

economic ideology, there are many who feel that it is much more

than a new market trend. “I don’t think there’s anything else that can radically reduce poverty and resource consumption at the same time, something humans must do to stabilize our global climate and society,” writes Neal Gorenflo, co-founder publisher of Shareable History of Sharing

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magazine (www.shareable.net). “However, the sharing economy is

not only a real solution, it’s also an inspiring true story. People experience it as empowering. It puts people in a new, constructive relation to one another. In the sharing economy, we host, fund, teach, drive, care, guide and cook for friends and strangers alike. This is a world where people help each other. It’s also a world where self-interest and the common good align.”

Just like the basic principles of sharing and cooperation, the term

“collaborative consumption” has been around for longer than you

might think. It was initially coined way back in 1978 by Marcus

Felson and Joe L. Spaeth in their paper “Community Structure and

Collaborative Consumption: A Routine Activity Approach” pub-

lished in
American Behavioral Scientist
. In that paper, which focused largely on the then-new concept of car sharing, the authors defined collaborative consumption as “those events in which one or more

persons consume economic goods or services in the process of en-

gaging in joint activities with one or more others.” Their research focused on the unique social and economic interactions that happen when emphasis is placed on community and connections. Human

beings prefer to do things together, and often, when tasks are tackled as a team rather than by individuals, the result is a solution that’s quick, easy to execute, and achieved through consensus rather than top-down decree. Felson and Spaeth found that goods and services

could be consumed collaboratively for mutual benefit. At the time, this was a new idea, but collaborative consumption is about more

than just consuming things simultaneously in the presence of others.

In fact, some people argue that the word “consumption” shouldn’t be there at all. “I think the operative phrase is ‘collaborative,’” points out Getaround’s Meg Murray. “I actually find the fact that collaborative is paired with consumption to be rather strange, since it should actually result in much less consumption.”

More recently, the term was used by Ray Algar, a UK-based

management consultant, in a 2007 article entitled “Collaborative

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Sharing is Good

Con sumption.”6 In it, Algar draws attention to the collaborative aspect of this new phenomenon, and rightly so. No longer are

consumers content to simply accept the selection, quality, or price dictated to them by those in power (the retailers, manufacturers, or politicians). Instead, Algar notes, individuals are using the Internet’s power of equalization to create, organize and store information (i.e., Wikipedia, the world’s biggest online encyclopedia, which is completely crowdsourced by an international community of volunteer

contributors and editors — a goldmine of well-presented infor-

mation for the savvy Web user). Consumers are also collaborating

to take back power in the marketplace (i.e., eBay, LivingSocial,

Groupon). “Collaborating to leverage discounts and incentives is an inevitable reality of ‘connected living,’” writes Algar. “Individuals are learning that it is better to be part of a crowd, and the crowd is fast becoming very wise.” Still, Algar’s focus is too narrow to embody the all-encompassing, paradigm-shattering vision that lurks in the sharing economy’s potential.

What’s Mine Is Yours,
a 2009 book by Rachel Botsman and

Roo Rodgers, is what finally helped to moved the term “collabora-

tive consumption” out of the experimental, academic, and business worlds and into the mainstream consciousness. “Collaborative

Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before,” write Botsman and Rodgers. Here we begin to feel the groundswell that many early researchers predicted. Even though

this definition still focuses on the tangible actions and benefits of sharing, it begins to represent a new vision for a social, environmental and economic system that is inclusive and compassionate as well as smart, efficient, and forward-thinking.

Though it feels revolutionary, collaborative consumption (or the

sharing economy, access economy, free economy, or gift economy —

all are terms used to refer to this movement) is a new twist on an History of Sharing

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old idea. It’s a reimagining of old solutions tweaked to keep up with the size and speed of our current society. It leverages our fascina-tion with social networking to minimize waste and maximize access.

Building upon principles that have been innate since before humans could speak, the sharing economy seeks to reinvent our idea of what it means to be a citizen, on both a hyper-local and a global scale.

No matter what you call it, collaborative consumption challenges

traditional definitions of professional success, personal wealth, and what it really means to be a productive member of our communities. Sharing allows us to create a new definition of value, not based on currency but on how much a thing, action, or person enriches

our lives, and it gives us the opportunity to enrich someone else’s in return.

Through the lens of collaborative consumption, it becomes clear

that it’s access, not ownership, that’s really essential to meeting our needs and wants. “Either out of financial necessity, or a lifestyle preference, people are not as interested in owning major assets, such as motor vehicles, as they once were,” points out Shelby Clark, founder of the car-sharing platform RelayRides. “Oftentimes, young people are identifying more with their mobile phones than cars as a symbol of independence.”

The sharing economy represents a fundamental challenge to the

prevailing top-down consumption model, agrees Lisa Fox, founder

of OpenShed, a popular goods-sharing service out of Australia.

“There is no merchant or middle man in collaborative consumption,”

says Fox, “individual private ownership is no longer the end goal, rather, access is.”

When we view ourselves as an element of an ecosystem, rather

than an autonomous being, we begin to understand that amass-

ing experiences, which often cost nothing and have no carbon