Cohousing Up Close in Colorado

Reposted in full from the Urban Ecology Australia newsletter, May/June 2011

'Cohousing communities exist in northern Europe, Canada, Australia, the UK and elsewhere. There are more than 100 in the US and nearly another hundred being planned. While not officially a cohousing development, Christie Walk follows similar principles and would certainly qualify as one. Recycling, resource sharing, thermal and water efficiency, a strong sense of community, shared spaces and activities, a range ofdwellings, social inclusion, and less emphasis on cars are just some of our common features.

This January I visited two cohousing communities in Colorado. Being midwinter I saw both under a blanket of snow in near freezing temperatures.

Nyland Cohousing is set in farmland a little east of Boulder, and has 135 people (110 adults and 35 kids) in 42 households on a large acreage of former farmland – 42 acres.

The land is partly being revegetated with local grasses, the rest available for organic gardening and farm projects. The houses built in 1992 include duplexes and triplexes and are smaller than average US homes, and the monthly townhouse association fee is lower than normal. Despite the large land available, the homes are grouped close together in lines running eastwest, to maximise southern sun access for heat/light/solar electric power and to make social interaction easy. (A regular developer would surely have placed them all in north-south rows to take in the view of the Rockies!) Cars are kept to the extremities, and ‘pedways’ (pedestrian ways) run between the rows of houses. Handcarts are used to move shopping or large items.

The ‘common house’ (a regular feature of cohousing projects) is a large separate building located among the houses – with a commercial kitchen and meeting rooms which are used for community meals and functions, and are sometimes hired out. It includes a young kids’ playroom, a teens game room, a laundry room, a craft room, a TV and ping pong room, a gym, a mailroom and two guest rooms (for which there’s a small nightly charge).

River Rock Commons is in the heart of Fort Collins, a town with a name for being ‘green’. Like Boulder, it has about 100,000 population and is set against the ‘front range’ of the Rockies but a little further north. River Rock is the second cohousing community there (the first being Grey Rock Commons), and has slightly less houses and residents than Nyland.

Houses, parking and pedways are similarly arranged to Nyland, and while some houses have a small backyard which they may choose to fence, there is no additional land.

To the north, however, River Rock has an elevated view over the adjacent public park and playing fields to trees flanking the Poudre River a few hundred metres away. At River Rock I was invited to see inside two homes, as well as the common house which was very similar in essence to Nyland’s. I also met more residents there, and immediately felt that they would have slotted into Christie Walk seamlessly, and vice versa, as our guiding principles and general arrangements are essentially similar.

As cohousing is so well established in the US, there are plenty of resources on their websites created by residents who have shared their experiences over the years. Topics like planning, financing and building are well discussed, and there’s a lot of information on things like social arrangements, shared work, pets, consensus decision making and dispute resolution.

The River Rock Manual is a good example of how an individual community works in practice. It welcomes new residents in a friendly and positive way, and explains that everyone is expected to participate in the work and life of the community.

Cleaning the Common House, for example, is done by all households on a rotating basis 3 to 4 times a year (except for under 15s and over 80s), though you can opt out and instead pay $20 per time. And everyone is expected to give at least 2 hours on monthly work days six times a year (they don’t have working bees the other 6 months due to weather).

Interestingly, renters who rent an entire unit take on that household’s community work responsibilities. Renters are also encouraged to participate in all activities to get the full River Rock experience.'

Advertising Overload

This clip is an amazing piece of work, it screens out all else but advertising to show how prevalent it is.

Sourced from Dangerous Intersection, 1 June 2011

'A Netherlands arts group, Studio Smack, put together this video which provides a stark look at all the logos and advertising one is exposed to throughout a normal daily routine.'

KAPITAAL from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

Stairs or Slide?

There should be more of this! I've always said multi-storey buildings should have internal spiral slides, a la The Magic Faraway Tree!

This is also a very clever piece of social media - viewed 2.2 million times, its an ad for Volkswagen, but people will share it because it makes them smile and is unexpected.

Sourced from YouTube, 11 June 2010

Masters in Economics for Transition

Sourced from the new economics foundation, May 2011

'From September 2011, Schumacher College, Dartington will be offer a new MA degree course in "The Economics for Transition: Achieving low carbon, high well-being, resilient economies". This pioneering postgraduate programme has been developed by nef, Schumacher College and the Transition Network, and is offered through the Business School at the University of Plymouth.

The programme is designed to support a new generation of leaders and activists to create an economy fit for the challenges of the 21st century. It will be attractive to people at different stages in their life seeking to make a positive contribution to the economics of transition through enhancing their knowledge; acquiring practical skills for sustainable living, working and ecological citizenship; and sharing experiences with people from all over the world.

Who is the programme for?

The programme is designed to support a new generation of leaders and activists to create an economy fit for the challenges of the 21st century. Schumacher College attracts people from all walks of life from across the globe – from business leaders and entrepreneurs to policy makers and social and environmental activists.

This programme will be attractive to people at different stages in their life seeking to make a positive contribution to the economics of transition through enhancing their knowledge; acquiring practical skills for sustainable living, working and ecological citizenship; and sharing experiences with people from all over the world.

Why a new masters in economics?

As the world struggles to recover from the most severe and synchronized downturn since the Great Depression, the reputation of economists has rarely been lower. For many, economics was a big part of the problem and so cannot be part of any solution.

Never has there been a more important time for a new approach to economics. Over the past two decades, key thinkers and practitioners have been developing alternative ways forward that once were dismissed as radical and marginal, but now are fast moving centre stage.

E.F. Schumacher was one of these foresighted pioneers who in 1973 laid out a new approach to economics that put values and compassion, people and planet at the centre of our economic system. To this day, Schumacher is known as the grandfather of new economics and his work has inspired a whole generation of leading thinkers, practising economists and environmental and social activists who have been growing the shoots of the new economy ever since. As we enter the decade of climate change, now is the time to make visible these achievements, learn from what works and in practice and co-create the great transition towards low carbon, high well-being, resilient economies

Challenges facing society that this Masters programme will address are:

• The triple crunch of climate change, financial crises and peak oil

• The crises in ecosystem health and social well-being across the globe

• The inter-connected nature of these crises and how they are systemically linked with the global economic model

• Growing disillusionment with current economic approaches and solutions

• How to transform these challenges into opportunities for change

Studying with leading thinkers, activists and practitioners

The MA in Economics for Transition is a collaboration between Schumacher College, the nef (the new economics foundation), the Transition Network and the Business School at the University of Plymouth. This provides a unique opportunity to study with leading thinkers, activists and practitioners in the new economy from a range of different perspectives.

Teachers include faculty from Schumacher College (Julie Richardson, Stephan Harding, Satish Kumar, and Philip Frances); nef (the new economics foundation) (including Andrew Simms, David Boyle and nef staff and associates), the Transition Network (including Naresh Giogrande, Sophy Banks and Rob Hopkins) and the University of Plymouth (including David Wheeler, Derek Shepherd, Atul Mishra and Lynda Rodwell).

Visiting teachers will be drawn from Schumacher College associates. In recent years, this has included Tim Jackson, Gunter Pauli, Wolfgang Sachs, Jonathon Porritt, Ed Mayo, Nic Marks, Vandana Shiva, Catherine Cameron, Janine Benyus, Ken Webster, Richard Douthwaite, Bunker Roy and many other key thinkers and activists. We will also be inviting new influential teachers such as Eve Mitleton Kelly who is Head of the Complexity Programme at the London School of Economics.

Course programme

• Module One: The Ecological Paradigm (20 credits)

• Module Two: The Emergence of the New Economy (20 credits)

• Module Three: The New Economy in Practice (20 credits)

• Elective Courses (20 credits each)
The short course options for 2011/12 will be finalised in the summer of 2011. Indicative titles for short courses include:
Creating a Transition Initiative (20 credits)
Sustainable Models of Enterprise (20 credits)
Ecological Leadership and Facilitation (20 credits)

Dissertation (80 credits)'

Legal Rights for Nature

Excerpt from Today's Zaman, 22 May 2011

Two small countries of Latin America have been taking Mother Earth, or 'Pachamama', quite seriously so they have passed a series of laws to protect it, and their worries reached some concerned citizens in Turkey where there has been a vigorous debate going on for making a new, citizen-centered constitution.

“We are just starting a campaign calling for an ecological constitution,” said Turkey’s Green Party spokesperson Ümit Şahin, who is among 40 people including politicians, academics, and lawyers involved in the Initiative for an Ecological Constitution (IEC).

“As Turkey has been talking about making a new constitution, which is supposed to value the individual, then we should be talking about an ecological approach to it,” Şahin said, adding that their role models are Bolivia and Ecuador, which understand the value and rights of Mother Earth. The IEC believes in this approach of the Latin American states, he said, because neither the European states nor the United States have been able to fully address the issue even though there are some examples like France, which has a Green Charter, and some states in the US, which have been adopting ecologically sensitive laws.

He noted that Ecuador’s is the first constitution in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature. Although a small country, Ecuador is home to the Galapagos Islands, Andean Mountains and Amazon rainforest as it is a geologically, ecologically and ethnically diverse country. Ecuador took a bold step in 2008 to add Rights for Nature to their new constitution providing a system of environmental protection based on rights. Şahin noted like many countries, Turkish laws treat ecosystems as articles of property that give land owners the right to destroy even fragile ecosystems, but that a lot of governments have started to enact environmental regulations to limit harm to ecosystems and impose fines for damage.

Additionally, a group of countries led by Bolivia have recently brought the issue to the agenda of the UN General Assembly as they ask for a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature so there will be legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they say are the rights of other members of the Earth, such as plants, animals and terrain.

Supporting the idea, Şahin said communities should be given more power to monitor and control industries and development to ensure harmony between humans and nature...'

The Three-Day Weekend - A Dream Deferred

Reposted in full from The Globe and Mail, 20 May 2011

'Is there anything nicer than a weekend in spring?

Actually, there is – a three-day weekend in spring.

Seventy-two precious hours of freedom. Finish that book on the bedside table. Stroll the park, scour the barbecue, plant the garden. Or, if you're really ambitious, tackle the clutter in the basement.

Canadians enjoy five or six of these brief furloughs a year. In fact, they savour them – tonics for the spirit – like bottles of vintage wine.

The regular weekend is like a speed bump. It slows you down, but doesn't last long enough to change your basic habits. Three days, on the other hand, is a legitimate rest. It allows you to reset the psychic thermostat.

So here's the real question du jour: Why aren't there more of them? What's so sacred about the five-day workweek, a regimen set in place in North America seven decades ago that has been virtually immoveable since (unlike in many European countries)? In an age of high-tech efficiency and higher productivity, why isn't the working world organized to provide us with more leisure time?

The benefits – social, economic, ecological – would be legion.

Certainly, we were promised it. For more than a century, a loud chorus of visionaries has lauded the fruits of science and technology, and the personal liberties they would confer.

It hasn't worked out that way. Indeed, as they embark on their annual Victoria Day weekend – National Patriots Day in Quebec – Canadians (tethered to BlackBerries, laptops and iPads) are more likely to be struck by a grimmer calculus. Our so-called work-life balance has lost its equilibrium. Increasingly, we are logging longer hours. Increasingly, we have less time for recreational pursuits.

The statistics confirm what, in our weary bones, we already know. According to one recent American study, the amount of leisure time per capita hasn't changed significantly in 105 years. To the extent that is has changed, it's for the worse. Although the time Canadians spent on leisure pursuits increased from 5.5 to 5.8 hours per day between 1986 and 1998, by 2005 it had reverted to the 1986 level, a decrease of 18 minutes per day.

In her 1993 book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Harvard professor Juliet Schor documents the steady annual rise of work hours after 1970. The uptick – about nine hours per year – applies to both men and woman, white- and blue-collar workers. The surprise factor derives from the productivity numbers, which doubled between 1948 and 1990. By then, Americans produced enough goods and services to have adopted a four-hour workday or a six-month work year. “Or,” writes Prof. Schor, “every U.S. worker could be taking every other year off from work – with pay.”

It never happened, of course. The productivity dividend was squandered. Leisure time became a casualty of prosperity.

Reclaiming the Utopians

None of this was expected. On the contrary, for more than a century, the West's reigning mythology of infinite progress promised a cornucopia of leisure.

In 1888, the third best-selling book in America – after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur – was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887. The central character in this utopian novel, Julian West, falls asleep in the 1880s and wakes up in the year 2000. The world he apprehends has been transformed into a kind of paradise. Working hours have been reduced dramatically. People retire at age 45, with full benefits. And, via technology, goods and services are delivered almost instantaneously.

In the 1920s, biologist Julian Huxley said a two-day workweek was inevitable, because “we can only consume so much.” If only he could see us now.

Endorsing Huxley, economist John Maynard Keynes observed in the 1930s that society would eventually face a pressing social issue: “The great problem of what to do with our leisure.”

Their fears were unfounded. Industrial society's ability to function with reduced work capacity was clearly demonstrated during the Second World War, when millions of men went off to the front. Had the same methodologies been preserved after 1945, argued philosopher Bertrand Russell, and “the workweek cut to four days, all would have been well. Instead, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed.” For Dr. Russell, “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

The post-war decades yielded a harvest of new labour-saving devices. By 1970, American writer Alvin (Future Shock) Toffler envisaged an irreversible exodus from the workplace, precipitating a boom in leisure-time activities. These roseate forecasts achieved consensus as the computer era dawned and gathered pace, spurred by the development of the integrated circuit in 1958.

“From the ashes of the work ethic will rise the phoenix of leisure,” trumpeted electronic engineers Alan Burkitt and Elaine Williams, in 1980. “People will have the opportunity of using more free time to pursue their leisure interests, and more money to spend on them.” And computer scientist Christopher Evans maintained that the microprocessor would “at long last make the humanistic dream of universal affluence and freedom from drudgery a reality.”

The cult of hard labour

So what went wrong? Ben Hunnicutt thinks he knows. “The problem is that work has taken the place of religion in our lives,” says the American sociologist, who teaches at the University of Iowa.

“All the mythologies associated with work are the same ones associated with God. Except work is a false God. The notion that we can grow our economies forever, reach full employment – it's easier to believe in the resurrection of the body. ”

The research of Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild verifies Prof. Hunnicutt's theory. For her 1997 book, The Time Bind, When Work becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Prof. Hochschild interviewed employees for an American corporation that had put enlightened, family-friendly policies for work-sharing, flex-time, parental leave and sabbaticals in place. Yet the usage rate proved shockingly low – not because management subtly discouraged their adoption, or because employees were unaware of the programs, or because they could not afford them. Higher-paid workers were even less likely to use flex-time than lower-paid workers.

“What I realized,” says Prof. Hochschild, “is that the village well has gone to work. If you asked these people where they felt good about themselves, where they felt supported, where they felt safe – it was always work. One man said, ‘I've worked for the company 30 years. I get pink slips at home.'”

And for all its mega-pixelated marvels, technology itself now degrades the quality of our leisure. As French philosopher Jacques Ellul noted, our leisure time, “instead of ... representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. ... Leisure time is mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free time than labour itself.”

It's time for a change – time to move, incrementally, toward a four-day workweek.

Utah implemented exactly that plan – four, 10-hour days, with no cuts to pay or benefit, for its non-essential public employees – in 2008. Half a dozen other U.S. jurisdictions are said to be studying it. The European community has gone much further. In Scandinavia, working parents have the right to insist on a four-day week, without salary cuts. In the Netherlands, that right applies to all employees.

The 72-hour gospel

So, how rich are the potential dividends of a four-day week? Let us count the ways.

Fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions: Let's assume there'd be about 20-per-cent fewer cars on the road for morning and afternoon rush hours. That would constitute a major reduction in crude oil usage. The same percentage decline would apply to chemical compounds spewed by cars and trucks – carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, ozone, lead and chloro-fluorocarbons. Global warming might even be reduced.

Disposable income: The 20-per-cent savings on gas, car maintenance and insurance would accrue to personal pocketbooks. The family sedan would last longer. Money otherwise allocated to these budget categories could be spent consuming other goods and services – so that overall levels of demand and consumption would not be affected.

Corporate incentives: Far from seeing the four-day week as a threat to productivity, the business world should welcome it. There would be significantly less absenteeism. With less stress on employees, companies would also be able to cut budgets for workplace stress-reduction and physiotherapy programs. Their own costs for heat, lights, security and building or office maintenance would also decline.

The well-being app: And finally, the three-day weekend's Killer App – call it the Well-Being App.

There'd be more time. Time for the family, a demonstrable, arguably urgent, need. And more time for the self. You could start that cottage industry you've been planning for years. Finish the screenplay. Take your kids on long hikes.

With more time, you would be able to cook more and eat out less (additional savings). You would watch less television. The habit is actually a reflex of exhaustion – European studies show that four-day workers are less inclined to park in front of the tube.

Instead of dropping your toddler at the day-care centre, you'd have one more day a week with him or her. Instead of missing the ballet class or the hockey game because of a corporate meeting, you would be there for it, video-camera in hand.

As a practical matter, “we need not adopt a one-size-fits-all template,” says John De Graaf, who runs the Seattle-based movement Take Back Your Time. “We have to recognize that people have different needs.”

But in dozens of ways, large and small, the three-day weekend would begin to repair the breach that has formed at the heart of Western culture – a breach in the quality of our lives.

Perhaps we need to become like Bartleby the scrivener in Herman Melville's short story. His boss repeatedly gives him assignments, to which the inscrutable legal assistant repeatedly says, “I'd prefer not to.”

If Facebook and Twitter postings can inspire a revolution that topples a dictator in Egypt, a campaign for a four-day workweek should be a piece of cake.

You have the next three days – at least – to think about it.'

Yarn Bombing: Creating Graffiti with Yarn

I like it! Woolly Bully indeed!

Reposted in full from New York Times, 18 May 2011

'The bronze statue of Rocky near the Philadelphia Museum of Art irked Jessie Hemmons. She found the statue too big, too macho and too touristy, so last month Ms. Hemmons, a 24-year-old artist, bombed him. With pinkish yarn.

Using a stepladder and a needle, Ms. Hemmons stitched a fuchsia-colored hooded vest on the fictional boxer with the words “Go See the Art” emblazoned across the front, to prod tourists to visit the museum that so many skip after snapping their photo with the statue.

She calls the act of artistic vandalism “yarn bombing,” adapting a term for plastering an area with graffiti tags.

“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”

Yarn bombing takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars — even objects as big as buses and bridges — have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night.

It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. In Paris, a yarn culprit has filled sidewalk cracks with colorful knots of yarn. In Denver, a group called Ladies Fancywork Society has crocheted tree trunks, park benches and public telephones. Seattle has the YarnCore collective (“Hardcore Chicks With Sharp Sticks”) and Stockholm has the knit crew Masquerade. In London, Knit the City has “yarnstormed” fountains and fences. And in Melbourne, Australia, a woman known as Bali conjures up cozies for bike racks and bus stops.

To record their ephemeral works (the fragile pieces begin to fray within weeks), yarn bombers photograph and videotape their creations and upload them to blogs, social networks and Web sites for all the world to see.

Sometimes called grandma graffiti, the movement got a boost, and a manifesto, in 2009 with the publication of the book “Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti,” by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, knitters from Vancouver, Canada. It is part coffee-table book, with color photographs of creative bombs, and part tutorial, with tips like wearing “ninja” black to avoid capture.

The book borrows from the vernacular of street graffiti and half-jokingly positions yarn bombing as an illicit alternative for knitters bored making yet another Christmas sweater. It asks readers to get off their rocking chairs and “take back the knit.”

Since the book’s publication, Ms. Prain said, she has been getting dozens of e-mails a week from yarn bombers from as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran. The last month has been particularly busy ever since a Canadian knitter declared June 11 International Yarn Bombing Day on Facebook.

Three film crews contacted her about making yarn bombing documentaries, and several graduate students e-mailed her about writing theses on the subject.

Many of these people also reached out to Magda Sayeg, a 37-year-old Texan who is considered by many to be the mother of yarn bombing. By her recollection, it started on a slow day in 2005 at Raye, her quirky boutique in Houston. On a lark, she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the shop’s door handle, a piece she now calls “alpha.”

Passers-by loved it, stopping to admire her handiwork. “People got out of their cars just to come look at it,” she said.

Next, she knitted what looked like a leg warmer for a stop sign down the street; from there she slowly infiltrated Houston with her stitchery. Within a few years, she had tagged dozens of lampposts and stop signs and assembled a crew of fellow yarn bombers she called Knitta Please.

Soon, Ms. Sayeg was commissioned to do larger projects. Photographs of her pieces spread online, inciting other knitters to take up the budding art form.

Yarn bombing grows out of the larger D.I.Y. movement, which seeks to resurrect traditional handicrafts “more typically associated with grandmothers, like knitting, canning, gardening and even raising chickens,” said Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Tex. In March it commissioned Ms. Sayeg to cover the trunks of 99 trees in front of the museum.

“You see the resurgence of handicrafts in art, too,” Ms. Carlozzi said. “It is part of the appeal of yarn bombing: the surprising juxtaposition of something that is clearly personal, labor-intensive and handmade in an urban, industrial environment.”

Not all artists who use yarn in their work are thrilled with the woolly trend.

“I don’t yarn bomb, I make art,” said Agata Oleksiak, 33, an artist in New York who has been enshrouding humans, bicycles and swimming pools in neon-colored crochet since 2003. Last Christmas Eve, Olek, as she prefers to be called, blanketed the “Charging Bull” statue near Wall Street in a pink and purple cozy, and uploaded a video of it to YouTube. “If someone calls my bull a yarn bomb, I get really upset,” she added.

Olek, whose work has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, considers yarn bombing to be the trite work of amateurs and exhibitionists.

“Lots of people have aunts or grandmas who paint,” she said. “Do you want to see that work in the galleries? No. The street is an extension of the gallery. Not everyone’s work deserves to be in public.”

Whether yarn bombing is the work of artists or glorified knitters, the view of law enforcement is clear: it is considered vandalism or littering. Still, the police seem to tolerate it. Yarn bombers say they rarely have run-ins with the law. And in the few instances when they are stopped, yarn bombers say, the police are more likely to laugh at them than issue a summons.

Ms. Prain once tried to yarn bomb a sign post in Washington, in front of F.B.I. headquarters. A security guard wearing a bulletproof vest approached her, she said, and demanded that she stop immediately. “Ma’am,” she recalled him saying, “step away with the knitting.”

Still, yarn bombing seems to be having its moment in pop culture. Fortune 500 companies have paid Ms. Sayeg as much as $20,000 to wrap their wares in yarn. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater last year for a promotional video. The makers of the Smart car flew her to Rome to wrap a car in what looked like 1970s-inspired throw blankets, and Mini Cooper recently commissioned a similar ad.

Ms. Sayeg has so much work that she closed her shop in 2009, moved to Austin and turned her hobby into a full-time job. Clients have included the Montague Street Business Improvement District in Brooklyn, which paid Ms. Sayeg to knit covers for 69 parking meters, and Insight, an Australian company that sells surfing clothing, which has an ad featuring a scantly clad woman riding a yarn-covered scooter. Last month, Ms. Sayeg wrapped all the heating ducts at the Brooklyn offices of Etsy.com.

Companies seem to be attracted to the retro handcrafted cheeriness of yarn. Toyota chose Ms. Sayeg for the Prius sweater project because her work is “optimistic and community oriented,” Sona Iliffe-Moon, a marketing executive for Toyota, wrote in an e-mail.

Ms. Sayeg now has five assistants to help her knit, which she now does primarily on looms rather than needles to meet the demand.

“In the early years I identified with underground graffiti artists,” she said. “Now the very people I feared I would get in trouble with are the ones inviting me to do this work for them.”'

Green Map System: Open Source Model to Foster Sustainable Communities

In the mid-90s, I was involved in getting the first Green Map (now lapsed) for the southern hemisphere produced for Adelaide! Open source tech and mobile applications now make this an even more powerful approach to finding green/sustainability sites and services, in any city, whatever language (as a common set of icons are used)

Reposted in full from Inhabitat, 12 May 2011

'Have you ever visited a new city and found yourself eating at the same tourist-oriented restaurants or buying wasteful plastic trinkets to give to friends? Have you been frustrated by a lack of local produce, community gardens, or composting stations in your home town? In a bustling metropolis like New York, green resources and businesses can be hard to find, even though they are present in almost every neighborhood, which is why a group of local designers led by Wendy Brawer developed the Green Map System, a tool that eases the search for a more eco-friendly life. During the Festival of Ideas, we stopped at Green Map’s booth to learn more about the organization and its hopes to resolve the lack of accessibility and visibility of New York’s sustainable urban features through an open source mapping website.

By compiling information on green places and initiatives from the citizens themselves, Green Map hopes to accelerate the growth of sustainable, interconnected communities. Green Map System was established in 1995 with the mission to promote inclusive participation in sustainable community development through the mapmaking medium.

The Green Map website provides adaptable tools and a graphic language, while local leaders and residents throughout the world create and populate the cartography with personal, intimate knowledge of places. These inventories turn into practical sustainable living guides for residents, and greener tourism options for travelers. Participants in the mapping process can access the interface online through user profiles and mapping groups, or can participate in workshops provided by the organization. The collaboration between individuals to inform themselves and others about their neighborhood enhances the general public’s knowledge about the area and fosters community building.

The communities then publish their graphic guides with the help of Green Maps, in various formats and graphic styles representative of each project. Green Maps in New York City include the Powerful Green Map, created in the aftermath of the 2003 blackout with the intent of teaching New Yorkers about their energy choices, and possibly preventing future blackouts. Green Maps can act as devices for education and change towards more sustainable communities.

With the implementation of smartphone apps and Open Green Maps in the last couple of years, Green Map hopes to expand the network of sustainable communities that have coalesced under the program. The i-phone app, winner of Treehugger’s 2011 Best of Green “Best Eco App for a Smart Phone,” includes a “What’s green nearby?” feature, which pinpoints sustainable businesses in the immediate surroundings of a mobile device. The Open Green Map, a participatory mapmaking website with more than 16,000 locations on view, provides an interactive platform to share insights, images, and impacts of local green sites of all kinds. Individual, thematic maps can be opened for a city or neighborhood, and all locations in user-created maps are compiled into a global Green Map.

Sites are organized within three main categories: Sustainable Living, Nature, and Culture and Society; icons on the map indicate the subcategory each location represents. Additional information about each place is presented real-time through an interface similar to that of Google Maps. Locations in New York City include East Village community gardens, organic and local food restaurants, and social service organizations. Open Green Map connects the local economy, green development and ecotourism movements, engaging citizens with local environment, climate and equity issues in New York and worldwide.'

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Sourced from YouTube, 31 May 2010

Rachel Botsman, co-author of "What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption", at TEDx Sydney, 2010

Excerpt from Grist, 4 May 2011

'Lots of the most interesting changes in the direction of sustainability are happening outside green politics (ie. the stuff I'm always writing about). One that's always fascinated me is the spread of sharing economies, or "collaborative consumption." Grist had Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, authors of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, in to visit the office a while back and they got me fired up about it all over again.

Now there's a big feature piece in Fast Company, "The Sharing Economy," in which Botsman and others discuss a dazzling variety of new start-ups based on peer-to-peer sharing of things, spaces, and services. They're popping up like dandelions in my backyard...

The key to this extraordinary surge is information technology, which has lowered transaction costs by orders of magnitude. It has become incredibly cheap to connect people so they can coordinate and exchange information. When I was a kid, growing up in Ancient Times, if I wanted to sell my old banana-seat bike and get a bike with gears, I had to call the newspaper, dictate a for-sale ad, and mail them a check. Or tack up flyers around public places. I might have found a buyer, but the time and effort required would have been substantial. And I would have had no way to pinpoint the real market value of the bike, ie. how much the person who wanted it most would pay.

Today, I can post a quick ad on Craigslist, sift through email responses (effectively an ad hoc auction), and arrange for someone to arrive at my door with money for the bike, and it costs me virtually nothing, maybe a half-hour of work. As these tools get easier and easier to use, bikes will circulate more. They will be used for more of their productive lives, instead of rotting in garages and landfills. Fewer new bikes will be needed than would otherwise have been the case. That's the idea, anyway.

The same is true for cars. The average car in the U.S. spends about 90 percent of the time just sitting there, taking up space. Now, there are more and more services that allow peer-to-peer car rental and ride sharing, which means, over time, existing cars will get used more often and fewer new ones will be needed. (Again: hopefully!) The same goes for other "underutilized assets" like tools (the average power drill is used 15 minutes over its lifetime) and sports equipment.

Another underutilized asset? Space: guest rooms, unused garage or shed storage, vacant apartments, summer homes, hotels during off seasons, etc. It's becoming easier for those with idle space to connect to people who happen to need it. Again: as existing spaces are utilized more fully, fewer new ones will be needed...or so goes the hope...

From an environmental perspective, it's a way for that fond and long-held hope, dematerialization, to start getting real traction. It turns out the ownership model, in and of itself, builds in a huge amount of resource inefficiency. We buy things that, by definition, as individuals, we cannot utilize fully, and they spend most of their time simply being owned (think of all your books and CDs, if you still have them). Now the ownership model is beginning to give way to the access model, wherein what's prized is access to services and experiences.

From a sustainability perspective, the crucial thing about an access model is that efficiency and durability are baked in; the profit incentive is naturally oriented toward getting the maximum number of human use-hours from the minimum amount of stuff. Just where we want the incentive to be! So greens have direct stake it seeing sharing models spread and flourish.

From an economic perspective, this puts real stress on the conventional ways of assessing an economy's performance. As sharing spreads, more and more socially productive activity will be "off the books" - no money will exchange hands, or if it does, it will be be a direct exchange, which, if it can be tracked at all, will basically count as a gift. Enterprises like Wikipedia, YouTube, and open-source software, which are based on the coordination of distributed, voluntary efforts ("social production"), add hugely to consumer welfare but do not produce much if any in the way of profits.

John Quiggin, in a great piece on this subject, notes one of the implications: "if monetary returns are weakly, or even negatively correlated with the value of social production, there's no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job in allocating resources to supporting innovation." If venture capitalists systematically underinvest in social production innovations, there's a good argument for government intervention.

Quiggin also notes another implication: "If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours." (Matt Yglesias also discusses this.) If jobs can be shared, just like things and spaces, then people will have more free time to engage in non-market but value-added activities, on what amounts to a hobbyist basis.

All this socially productive activity will not count toward GDP and will not be captured as value by traditional economic models. Eventually, it will militate in favor of alternative economic measures like nef's Happy Planet Index or Bhutan's gross national happiness, which try to capture well-being directly.

From a social perspective, it seems to me sharing models answer a deep need among those in rich developing nations (particularly the US) for an increased sense of connection and community. We tried retreating to our well-appointed redoubts in the exurbs and accumulating stuff, and it's not working. We're getting richer but not any happier - widening inequality and social distance are hurting us more than increased consumer power is helping us. People yearn to be knit into networks of trust and support. Peer-to-peer sharing is one way to start building that kind of social capital...'

Stepping Back to Civilize Ourselves

Excerpt from the New Internationalist, 29 April 2011

Spring is in the air. But that’s not why everyone’s so happy in Sunny England this week!The weather is more mid-summer than spring, really, with blazing sun and not a cloud in sight. The weather cheers people up enormously, no doubt. But the thing that seems to make everyone smile is the fact that they’ve all had four days off, a three-day working week for heaven’s sake with Easter Week and the Bank Holidays. Folks have gone back to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, then have Friday off for the Royal Wedding. I’ve honestly never seen everyone look so perky in this country before...

Someone said, ‘Everyone really should have a three-day week. It’s perfect.’ And looking at the happy faces around I wondered, why ever not? The artificial work cycle as we know it came with the Industrial Revolution. Till then, most people followed the natural agricultural cycle. They worked hard when it was ploughing, sowing, reaping or harvest time and then they relaxed when it was all over. There was a natural rhythm to life...

As we sail through the 21st century, I watch with dismay as hard-won labour laws stop being effective. I see unions lose control completely and people go back to working long exploitative hours for fear of losing their jobs in a man-made recession which allows corrupt city sharks to swallow up pensioners’ hard-earned money, while the bankers responsible walk away with million dollar bonuses. I see young people fritter away their youth and their lives for a few dollars more, with little time to stop and stare, enjoy the spring, smell the flowers or just be young and silly. Their companies don’t allow them to. They seem to own their souls.

I’m not just talking about the factory worker who is exploited. I’m looking at the young, up and coming ‘professional’, young bankers, Wall Street yuppies, IT professionals. They are as owned by the company as the miners in the 1950s song ‘I owe my soul to the company store’. Its velvet gloved but the principle is the same. They don’t own their souls anymore.

In some circles, people are trying to reclaim the lost art of living by opting for a three day week. This allows other people to have jobs, while it gives them time to breathe again. They will be dismissed as lacking in ambition, not getting to the top of the ladder, etc. etc. But they’ve chosen to opt out of the rat race. They are actually getting a life.

May their tribe increase. If by some miracle they manage to make their point of view mainstream, we’d be taking a step back to becoming civilized again!'

The Myth of Apathy

Reposted in full from Sustainable Life Media

'The conundrum

At this moment in time, there is no shortage of good ideas about how to make the world cleaner and greener.

We live in an era where there is an abundance of juicy good ideas, more awareness than ever about our ecological contexts. Information about the vastness of biodiversity, creatures in the deep seas and remote corners of this planet, the fragility of our home. Information about the threats. More information, period.

And yet, the riddle at the center of just about any sustainability effort (worth its salt) is why we are not taking action. Let’s be even more specific: actions that we know would have a good chance of mitigating some of the most severe threats facing our horizon, from climate change to overfishing to toxic contamination of air, water and dirt. Actions that we know from an ecological, economic, political and spiritual standpoint would do us all – plants, critters, humans – a lot of good. This has been referred alternately as the “gap” between values and behavior, or attitudes and actions. Is there actually a “gap” or is there maybe more of a “tangle” of confusion, emotions and desires?

The image of the moralizing environmentalist has been changing, as marketing agencies and corporations are cottoning on to the fact that if we make green sexy, hot, and profitable, more people will “buy” into it (pun intended). Green sells. Yet something fundamental may be glossed over. It is as if we can somehow suture together the rifts inherent in our consumptive-based way of life, and all that led us to this point (yes, all of it, from the first coal mines carved out of the British Isles to the present moment), and smooth it all into one lovely, profitable and seamless green dream.

While this vision is intensely appealing, it is psychologically problematic, emotionally confusing, and ideologically incoherent. Clinical psychology – the folks who work on the front lines with people and groups on a daily basis to effect change – knows that in fact we are always negotiating dilemmas and conflicting values and desires. It’s part of being human. And sustainability is no exception. The reason is that most of us are embedded in the very practices, desires, goods, textures and sensations that contribute to our ecological ills. And if we are not embedded, we are in contact in some way or another with the products of our industrial and post-industrial achievements. Psychologists refer to this state as “dissociation”– our capacities to both know and “not know” and split off our awareness so we can function normally.

Why does this matter for us, as we work hard to integrate sustainability at every level of our organizations, woven into the fabric of our branding and our culture? Because this paradox gets to the heart of why people may continue to do nothing to help save or protect our environment, despite our best wishes, hopes, desires and dreams to do so.

Being green is attractive, desirable and profitable. However – and it may be hard to accept this, particularly for those of us working hard on selling sustainability – it is also potentially frightening. Going green, if we really pay attention, is about how we construct meaning in our lives. Until we incorporate the whole picture – opportunity, innovation and creativity, as well as fear, anxieties or losses of cherished identities tied to consumptive (and wasteful) practices – into our vision of being sustainable, we are going to be fighting a battle. Flowing against a current. When in fact, we can be flowing with the current – if we can acknowledge paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas these topics can bring up.

What’s actually going on.

We are constantly reminded at how little the “public” seems to care about the most pressing ecological threats facing us, such as the latest Gallup poll in March 2010 indicating Americans' worries about environmental issues have hit a 20-year low. It can be very hard to know exactly what people feel and think about sustainability, and it is tempting to assume apathy is the status quo.

Apathy has become a term used to describe the disjuncture between the exigency of a situation (chronic, ecological threats) and adequate emotional, intellectual or physical response. We think of apathy as the central driver for public inaction in the face of serious issues, whether it is political injustice, ecological devastation or plain wrongness in the world. Apathy is a blanket term to describe what seems to almost defy description: the lack of pathos. From the Greek root apatheia, it means quite literally lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern (OED, 2011). Apathy is perceived commonly as an “enemy” – of reform, political action, up-take. It can also be seen as shorthand for “selfish,” “ignorant” or “greedy” – attributes often ascribed to “the public” for not “doing enough” to protect our collective resources, fellow creatures and planet.

If we examine apathy as a viable descriptor for human experience and behavior, we may find some surprising implicit assumptions about humans. Such tacit assumptions also run throughout much of our communications and outreach strategies. They include the following:

If someone believes, feels or values something, there is a necessary correlative in their actions.

That we are aware of all of our thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, and conflicts at any given time and can adequately provide them on request (such as in a poll or survey).

Humans have the capacity to quite literally turn off their feelings, sensations or responses to the world around them.

The “public” is largely passive, and what is required are ever more ingenious communication strategies to mobilize, inspire, cajole, threaten, frighten or force specific actions.

What all of these assumptions have in common is a particular conception of human psychology: that we are largely rational beings who are self-determined, transparent to ourselves and to others, and with the right levers and motivators, can be enticed to take certain actions and avoid others. It’s a stunning image of human nature once you scratch the surface; and a pretty crude one. It shows up in our tendency to follow poll data and segmentation, as if we really can be placed into fixed and static boxes. It makes research easier, but how accurate is this really?

A more compelling and arguably accurate conception of human nature may be one that assumes contradiction, anxiety, ambivalence, paradox, and dilemmas. It assumes there may be huge reserves of care and concern, but complicated by a whole variety of pushes and pulls on our attention, identity, and investments. It takes onboard that with change, there is often loss. And with loss, there is often mourning and melancholia. And with grief and loss – when met adequately with support, there can be space for creative engagement, participation, care and concern.

It is our job to meet our customers where they are, and in order to, we need to have far better insight into what is actually going on for them. All the messy stuff.

It may seem entirely contrary to our mission to think about these aspects of human behavior. We want to focus on solutions and getting the job done: the bottom line. And my point is that if we don’t attend to these aspects our work will be harder. We will continuously trigger people in undesired ways, by speaking only to part of the picture. It’s our “affect” and emotional investments (often unconscious) that drive most decisions we make. Resources and guidance are available to us, but maybe not where we’d expect it.

Putting it into practice.

So what would it look like, if we were to take these ideas and put them into practice?

Rethinking research.We would design innovative methods for understanding what people are thinking, feeling and sensing with regard to our particular value offerings. Rather than relying on polls or surveys, we would partner and collaborate with those coming from clinically psychologically informed backgrounds to help us develop cutting edge methods, that yield rich insight into the dilemmas our customers may be experiencing; and how to then help them “cross over.”

Speaking the truth.Glossing over the challenges we face is at best patronizing, and at worst, damaging to our brand. What would branding look like if it was straight talking, and assumed customers may feel overwhelmed, and to build a healthier world? This simple shift in acknowledging dilemmas helps disarm the tendency to fill in the gaps in what we don’t say, undermining the power of our messaging.

Authenticity.A credible and authentic brand and voice is one that can tap into the emotional resonances of our clients. We currently do this; let’s just broaden the range a bit more. Climate change, nuclear contamination, massive oil spills and loss of species are scary and painful issues we all face. There is no branding that will undo that reality. Rather than stick a smiling face on everything, build a brand rooted in an authentic acknowledgement of both reality and the possibility.

Humans are by and large, truth-seeking creatures. We love the truth, it feels good to us when we sense and feel it. Let’s try branding that does not assume our clients are apathetic but rather may be a bit stuck. It’s our job to help them along, and one way is to build a branding and platform rooted in the messy complexity of what it means to be human, right now.

The Sharing Economy

"Business has spent centuries making buying really easy...we're just at the beginning of making sharing easy."

Reposted in full from The Fast Company, 18 April 2011

'It's 8:30 a.m. in Silicon Valley, and Neal Gorenflo is already busy sharing. Inside his Mountain View town house, just a few short blocks from the Caltrain station where commuters pour out each morning on their way to Google, Gorenflo hands over his 15-month-old son, Jake, to a nanny he shares with his neighbor. At a local coffee shop, he logs on to a peer-to-peer banking site called Lending Club to make a series of small loans to someone planning a wedding, another starting a pet business, and a guy named Pat who wants to move. After biking down to the station, he drags his ancient Peugeot onto the train to San Francisco, where he hops into a Prius he's reserved for a few hours from City CarShare, a not-for-profit version of Zipcar.

After driving out to Berkeley for a tour of a cohousing community, he finally lands at a shared office space in SoMa, from which he works once a week. "What typically happens is when people try one sharing behavior, then they start to think, What can I do next?" says the 47-year-old ex-equities analyst. "And those small changes ultimately lead to big changes."

Gorenflo does, of course, still own stuff. He owns his house and his laptop and his clothes and even that old Peugeot bike (Mountain View won't get a bike-sharing program till later this year). But the self-described "sharing hacker" has come a long way in a short time from his past existence as a corporate exec. In 2004, he was a strategist for a division of shipping giant DHL, splitting time between San Francisco and company headquarters in Brussels. The Up in the Air life was not for him - he started noticing that most thirtysomething expats in his office were divorced, and he worried that his relationship with Andrea, his girlfriend, might be headed for trouble. "Our mission statement at DHL was something like, 'To be the best box mover in the world,' " recalls Gorenflo, who resembles a compact Kris Kristofferson. "I thought, What am I doing?" One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut - she's now his wife. But the corporate life did not. In late 2009, he started Shareable, a not-for-profit web hub that provides individuals and groups with a playbook for how to build systems for sharing everything from baby food and housing to skills and solar panels.

"Business has spent centuries making buying really easy," says Gorenflo. "We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy."

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.

The earliest of these marketplaces, like Freecycle and CouchSurfing, encouraged the exchange of goods among peers for free. But the latest sharing platforms are anchored in commerce. They have the potential to amass a new ecosystem of entrepreneurs, just as eBay once aggregated fragmented buyers and sellers into a global online marketplace. Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013. Frost & Sullivan projects that car-sharing revenues in North America alone will hit $3.3 billion by 2016. And Botsman says the consumer peer-to-peer rental market will become a $26 billion sector, and believes the sharing economy, in toto, is a $110 billion-plus market. "Is this purely a warm-and-fuzzy kind of thing?" says Ann Miura-Ko, a venture capitalist at Floodgate Fund who, along with partner Mike Maples (an early backer of Twitter and Digg), has invested in three sharing businesses. "It's not. As a venture capitalist, I'd never invest in something that's purely warm and fuzzy." In fact, in the past year, Google Ventures; Sequoia Capital; and Greylock Partners' Reid Hoffman, the cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, have all backed "sharing" ventures. (Actually, Silicon Valley's preferred phrase is "underused asset utilization." As Howard Hartenbaum, general partner at August Capital, explains, "It's more obvious how you make money.")

Now that the sharing economy is gaining the backing of the financial community, corporations from car manufacturers to big-box retailers better start paying attention. "This has the potential to be lethally disruptive," says Umair Haque, an economist who recently published The New Capitalist Manifesto with Harvard Business Press. Sharing platforms won't bankrupt a company like Home Depot, says Haque, but they could eat away at its business. "If the people formerly known as consumers begin consuming 10% less and peering 10% more, the effect on margins of traditional corporations is going to be disproportionately greater," says Haque. "Which means certain industries have to rewire themselves, or prepare to sink into the quicksand of the past."

On a damp February evening in San Francisco, the founders of AirBnB -- one of the hottest startups in the sharing scene -- are reminiscing about the first strangers who slept on their apartment floor. "We had a 38-year-old female who worked at Razorfish. And then an industrial designer from Salt Lake City who was even older. They slept on an air mattress on our kitchen floor," says Joe Gebbia, AirBnB's hoodie-wearing head of user experience. Back in 2007, Gebbia and Brian Chesky were recent RISD graduates in need of extra cash to pay their rent. On a whim, they built a website offering attendees of a design conference a unique place to stay -- in their apartment, on those air mattresses, with a home-cooked breakfast. Says Gebbia of their houseguests, "They broke every assumption we ever made about who would stay on an air bed at a stranger's house." Encouraged, he and Chesky decided to try and build a business: a web platform where booking a room in a person's home anywhere in the world was as easy as booking a hotel room.

The challenge with building a marketplace is to ensure that there is both supply and demand. "It's a chicken-and-egg problem," says James Reinhart, cofounder of ThredUp, a venture-backed startup that helps people unload or swap children's clothing and toys -- the ultimate forced obsolescence -- by the box. An alum of Harvard Business School, Reinhart closely studied eBay, which in its early days helped create demand by making it free for anyone to list. "You have to pick which side to subsidize," says Reinhart. Like eBay, ThredUp started out by funding the supply -- the company bought hundreds of boxes of clothing before launch, so it could open up with inventory. ThredUp now gives users a credit every time they post a box of stuff their kids can no longer use. They can use the credit to acquire a box of goodies more in line with the current age of their children. Boxes that are unsold after two weeks are either given a fire-sale price or donated to charity. "The worst experience," he says, "is having a box of children's clothes to sell and nobody who wants it."

AirBnB, on the other hand, had to create demand. Gebbia and Chesky had no problem ginning up a marketplace when a major event occurred in a city with limited hotel space, like the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. But when there was no urgency, business slowed to a trickle. As a result, Chesky and Gebbia put in a lot of time meeting AirBnB's early suppliers, spending the night at their homes, and organizing user meetups. They learned that people weren't willing to pay for a room they couldn't see, so Chesky and Gebbia insisted on beautiful wide-angle high-resolution photos. Early on, they placed an artificial cap on price, but they experimented with lifting it -- suddenly, hosts began renting out entire apartments, and the experiment became the norm. "Today, if you add up all of our listings in New York City, it's probably safe to say we're 10 times larger than any hotel," says CEO Chesky. "We're on almost every single block in the city."

AirBnB is now in more than 8,000 cities, and rents houses, castles, cars, yachts -- even igloos. "I knew within three minutes I would be very interested," says Greylock's Hoffman, who invested $7.1 million in AirBnB last April, several months after Sequoia Capital led a seed round. AirBnB -- growing at a staggering 45% average rate, month over month -- sees travel as but a first step. "If you look at it as the eBay for space," says Hoffman, "people have a massive amount of liquidity and economic value tied up in their space. The ability to parse that in different ways ... the sky's the limit." Unlike VRBO, which is limited to renting second homes, the future of AirBnB is not only in monetizing the houses, say the founders, but in monetizing all the stuff in houses, front yards, backyards, and driveways. "I only invest," says Hoffman, "when I think a company will be a multibillion-dollar company."

This is why sharing startups have piqued the attention of Sand Hill Road. "It has the potential to be really disruptive. Amazon came first, then eBay, and peer-to-peer is next. It's almost as far as you can get on the spectrum of goods exchanged," says Josh Felser, an investor at Freestyle Capital. In January, Craig Shapiro, former president of Good Worldwide, left the media company to start Collaborative Fund, a venture fund that will invest mostly in collaborative-consumption businesses. "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says Shapiro, whose investors include YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley, MIT Media Lab cocreator Nicholas Negroponte, and even Botsman.

Not every category is a natural for sharing. "Expensive electronics wouldn't work," says Punsri Abeywickrema, a former LinkedIn software engineer who founded an online rental company called Rentalic in 2008. Abeywickrema built the platform as a marketplace for rentals of everything from handbags to lawn mowers. But after nine months of user testing, he concluded that shareable objects had to fit specific criteria: They must cost more than $100 but less than $500, be easily transportable, and be infrequently used. As a result of his research, Abeywickrema has narrowed the site's scope to sporting goods and outdoor gear.

The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser. "We haven't seen any mass-market approach to combining distributed trust and sharing." Most sharing platforms try to combat this issue by building a self-policing community. Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system.

But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world. "Sure, there's always the argument that anyone can be an ax murderer," concedes TrustCloud cofounder Xin Chung. "But you get a lot more indicators in data exhaust than you do in walking up to somebody in khakis and a crisp white shirt on the street. I'd pick the data exhaust any day."

Of course, there is one company that is already collecting a ton of that data exhaust on its own site: Facebook. "Think of sites like Yelp and eBay," says Carl Sjogreen, manager of Facebook's platform product team. "They invested a ton of resources for building a notion of reputation online, but all based on pseudonyms, like joebob77 on eBay. We decided early on to be a social-networking site based on your real identity with your real name." With more than 600 million registered users, 250 million people engaging with Facebook on external websites every month, and social plug-ins that are creeping into an estimated 10,000 new websites a day, Facebook has the potential to become the arbiter of online trust. "The incentive to be a good player in that ecosystem goes up dramatically when it's associated with my real identity," says Sjogreen, "because if someone leaves a bad review of me on AirBnB, that will carry with me to the rest of the web."

Last February, on the evening before the North American International Auto Show, in Detroit, Lisa Gansky gave a TEDx talk to an audience of some 300 people in the Fisher Theatre, including designers from brands such as Ford and Lincoln. She asked the crowd what percentage of time the average person uses his car. While a couple of folks mumbled a guess, no one was prepared for the statistic Gansky had at hand. "Across the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, it's 8%," she said. "Which means that over 90% of the time, this thing that costs us a lot of money is just sitting around."

Gansky had been invited to explain "the mesh," a concept she coined in her book by the same name, which was published last September (as was Botsman's). Both authors believe the development of this mesh of shared things will affect not only the way we consume but also the way successful companies will be built. Gansky, a tech entrepreneur who made tens of millions of dollars selling startups to AOL and Kodak, thinks this means that the car companies must start behaving like a platform. "It would be really great," Gansky told her audience, "if any moment now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off the assembly line."

Cars are the ultimate expensive underutilized commodity. Eleven years ago, Zipcar started convincing urbanites that they could shun car ownership and enjoy the perks of access without any expense or inconvenience. Zipcar is now getting ready for its IPO. But a slew of new venture-backed car-sharing and ride-sharing startups have recently emerged, and their business model might be more efficient than Zipcar's. Zipcar, which has yet to turn a profit, is saddled by the expansion and maintenance of its fleet, a cost that now clocks in at more than $90 million. Platforms like RelayRides, Zimride, Spride, and Getaround don't own any cars -- they simply enable the sharing of autos owned by individuals.

The economic incentive to share your second-most-valuable asset with a stranger may be compelling. "The average person using RelayRides makes $250 a month renting," says Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides, which is backed by August Capital and Google Ventures. "Some users are making enough on RelayRides that it's offsetting their entire car payment. They're basically getting a free car." And since RelayRides has a $1 million insurance policy covering both sides during each reservation, it's low risk.

And then there are the noneconomic benefits. Clark says that when people's mobility costs shift from being fixed (ownership) to variable (renting), they make more efficient decisions about when they actually need to drive. "Studies have shown," says Clark, "that the average car sharer drives 40% less than the average owner." Shareable's Gorenflo believes this makes car sharing the "gateway drug" to other types of sharing. "Historically, cars were the vehicle into hyperconsumption," says Gorenflo. "It looks like they could be the vehicle out of it too."

Car manufacturers are starting to pay attention. In early 2010, Peugeot rolled out a mobility rental service called Mu. A membership gives people access to not only customizable Peugeot cars (fitted with bike racks, snow tires, and TVs) but also to electric scooters and bikes. "In the biggest cities in Europe, we see people giving up ownership of the car to switch to sheer usage," says Peugeot's Nadège Faul. By the end of 2011, Mu will expand from six cities to 70. "We are convinced it's a new age of car manufacturing," she says. "Either we take care of it and recognize this new market or we might just as well lose these consumers for good."

German car manufacturer Daimler is taking this new reality even more seriously. Its Car2Go service is similar to Zipcar's, except that it doesn't require a reservation or a two-way trip. Car2Go's mobile app allows a person walking down the street in Ulm, Germany, or Austin (its two pilot cities), to locate a Smart car on that block, access it immediately via a windshield card reader and PIN number, drive it anywhere locally, and leave it there for someone else to use. The fuel-efficient Smart car has a 100-watt solar roof, which powers the car's telematics and its battery. "According to a Frost & Sullivan study from 2010," says Car2Go managing director Robert Henrich, "the revenue in the car-sharing market will soon be in the billions. This is the order of magnitude we are looking at." Henrich will begin commercializing Car2Go this year, with plans to expand to 100 cities in the U.S. and Europe.

Daimler is investing so much in this market that it has started developing apps that work for any car - not just a Daimler-made vehicle. Last September, Daimler's innovation group in Germany started piloting Car2Gether, which offers an app to match local drivers with people looking for a ride. Riders submit a request to a driver - who can be driving any kind of car, not just a Daimler - and both profiles are linked to their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. After the ride, both driver and passenger rate each other. "We want to make this a social network on wheels," says Michael Kuhn, project manager of Car2Gether, who doesn't even know if Daimler will - or can -commercialize the service. "It's all about access trumps ownership," says Kuhn, sounding far more Silicon Valley than Stuttgart, Germany.

The carmaker realizes that sharing systems are going to be created whether it joins the party or not. "If you don't build a value cycle," says economist Haque, "one will be self-organized. And it will commoditize you." Whether it's moms opting to buy baby clothes from other moms through ThredUp rather than visiting Baby Gap, or neighbors borrowing a drill through NeighborGoods instead of going to Target, consumers - or, perhaps more appropriately, citizens - are being connected in a way that cuts out the corporate middleman. "We often think about this stuff purely as secondary markets," says Haque, "but I think there's a deeper truth here, which is we're learning we don't have to obey these industrial rules of producer versus consumer. We can take the stuff we have and cycle it."

The sharing economy is at one of those interesting junctures where no one knows how big it might get or how many industries and companies it might affect. Best Buy and Lowe's, to cite two relatively unlikely candidates, have started to contemplate how it might impact retail. "I would say this notion of sharing is something we've been talking about in the last 12 months," says Lowe's VP of new business development Jay Rebello. "Social networking is impacting the definition of what a community is, and, in the past, people wanted to accumulate more stuff. More recently, we're seeing people view that differently." And in sectors like banking, where Wall Street's behavior has led to immense consumer distrust, disintermediation via sharing is becoming a reality. "We benefited enormously from the banking crisis," says Giles Andres, CEO of Zopa, one of the several peer-to-peer lending sites, like Lending Club, that have emerged over the past several years. "That was the catalyst for going from early adopters to a more mass-market crowd."

"I think P-to-P banking is going to be hugely disruptive to the banking industry," says Haque. He may be right. Still, it's hard to envision a big peer-to-peer market in $1 million mortgages, for example. As he himself says, "The finance guys are proficient on maintaining their stranglehold on the status quo, trying to convince us that without them we'll fall apart." But Haque's faith is based on the principle that's at the very heart of the new sharing economy: the resilience of distributed systems. He offers as parable the way that villages and communities survived the Irish banking crisis of the late '70s, during which bankers - yes, bankers - went on strike. They warned the public that the economy would collapse without a banking system. "What happened instead," says Haque, "was a P-to-P banking system emerged out of nowhere. The local pubs became the de facto banks, lending money to their customers. If you think about it, who is a better judge of character in Ireland than the bartender?"

He laughs. "The economy did not stop growing -- it didn't even falter."'