[Scpg] 10 Ways Our World is Becoming More Shareable

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

10 Ways Our World is Becoming More Shareable
Yes Magazine   
June 25th, 2010
Share and Enjoy:
http://news.yourolivebranch.org/2010/06/25/10-ways-our-world-is-becoming-more-shareable/ 
	*	            

by Neal Gorenflo, Jeremy Adam Smith

Sharing is a big deal these days. Sharing is a 
growth industry, a new field of study and of 
practice; it presents a realm of career 
opportunities, a new way of life, and a concept 
around which we are restructuring our world. 
Sharing is the answer to some of today's biggest 
questions: How will we meet the needs of the 
world's enormous population? How do we reduce our 
impact on the planet and cope with the 
destruction already inflicted? How can we each be 
healthy, enjoy life, and create thriving 
communities?
-Janelle Orsi, "Four Degrees of Sharing"


Our world is inherently shareable, though it's 
easy to take that for granted. We are already 
historically connected by climate, roads, 
fisheries, language, forests, culture, and social 
networks, all of which are part of the commons. 
But in recent decades, the rules of access and 
ownership have started to shift in new 
directions, making sharing more convenient, 
necessary, fulfilling, and even profitable. Here 
are ten  ways that our world is becoming more 
shareable.

Sharing as a Lifestyle. The ways to share in 
everyday life seem to be multiplying like 
rabbits, but maybe the Great Recession is just 
forcing all of us to pay more attention these 
days.
There's 
carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing, yardsharing, 
coworking, cohousing, tool libraries, all kinds 
of cooperatives-it goes on, trust us. And ways to 
share power, dialogue, and knowledge, such as 
workplace democracy, citizens' deliberative 
councils, unconferences, open space, and world 
café, are getting more attention these days, 
aided by innovative Web 2.0 tools.
There are also scores of new websites-like 
Divvy, Neighborgoods, ShareSomeSugar, Relay 
Rides, Rentalic, hyperlocavore, and many 
more-designed to help us share real stuff. Taking 
all of these into account, it's entirely possible 
to create a complete lifestyle based on sharing. 
You can live in a cohousing community, work in a 
co-op, grow food in your neighbor's yard, and get 
to the open space town council meeting via your 
carshare. Want to know about the nuts and bolts 
of how to build a Shareable life? Check out The 
Sharing Solution by Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow.

Shareable Cities. A revolution is underway in our 
understanding of cities. The revolution couldn't 
come any sooner, considering that 2007 was the 
first year in human history that the majority of 
human beings lived in cities. Perhaps as a 
result, cities are becoming the focal point for 
our collective hopes and dreams, as well as all 
kinds of innovation needed to avert a worsening 
climate crisis.

In the past, we tended to see cities as dirty, 
unnatural, and isolating places; today, citizens 
and urban planners alike are starting to see 
their potential for generating widespread 
well-being at low financial and environmental 
cost. There's increasing appreciation for the 
benefits of public transit, urban agriculture, 
making room on the streets for pedestrians and 
bicyclists, and for civic engagement. The very 
thing that defines a city-its population 
density-makes sharing easier, from cars to bikes 
to homes.
Perhaps in response, there seems to be a 
boomlet in technology that helps First World 
urbanites understand their environment, share, 
and use resources more effectively; IBM has based 
their massive Smarter Cities advertising campaign 
around this theme. But it may be that the most 
successful innovations will spring from the 
megacities of the developing world. In the 
absence of vast financial resources, these cities 
may do as Bogotá, Colombia did and prioritize 
human well being over economic growth. Can a city 
become a happiness commons? Former Bogotá mayor 
Enrique Penalosa knows from experience that it's 
possible.

Social Enterprise & Cooperatives. Definitions 
vary, but in general social enterprises, whether 
nonprofit or for-profit, offer a product or 
service in order to advance a social or 
environmental mission with benefits for all. The 
industry is small relative to the overall 
economy, but growing extremely fast in some 
sectors:
	*	Nonprofit earned income grew over 
200 percent to $251 billion between 1982 and 2002.
	*	Investment in clean tech ventures 
nearly trebled to $5.2 billion between 2004 and 
2008 (though it has declined recently thanks to 
the Great Recession).
	*	Fair trade good sales doubled 
between 2004 and 2007 to around $4 billion.
	*	Over 11,000 worker cooperatives 
have emerged in just the last 30 years, many them 
embracing prosocial missions in addition to being 
managed, governed, and owned by the people who 
work at them.
	*	Social investing could grow to 
$500 billion in assets under management in 5-10 
years, according to the Monitor Institute.

The Nonprofit Sector. Nonprofits are an 
increasingly important way for people to share 
their wealth and labor. Nicola Goren, former 
acting CEO of the Corporation for National and 
Community Service, said in a speech last year 
that we're in a midst of "a bona fide compassion 
boom." The Obama administration is encouraging 
the trend toward mutual aid with the United We 
Serve program. With engagement and social 
enterpreneurship growing, Bill Drayton may be 
right: We may yet evolve into a world 
where everyone is a change-maker.
	*	In the U.S. alone, donations to 
nonprofits more than doubled between 1987 and 
2007, to $303 billion.
	*	About 75 percent of all donations 
come from private individuals like you and me.
	*	The number of nonprofits doubled 
between 1991 and 2006, to 1.9 million.
	*	In 2005, nonprofits employed 12.9 
million people, or 9.7 percent of the US 
workforce.
	*	In 2008, 61.8 million volunteers 
dedicated more than 8 billion hours of service, 
worth an estimated $162 billion.

Microfinance is a powerful innovation that 
extends small loans and financial services to 
help the world's poorest rise out of 
poverty, serving customers traditional banks 
ignore. The growth of Nobel Peace Prize winner 
Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank, and its success in 
alleviating poverty in Bangladesh, helped trigger 
an almost unmanageable surge of money into the 
sector-currently about $25 billion, and growing 
fast. Grameen has low-interest loan programs for 
a variety of poor borrowers, including 
no-interest loans, and is owned by the rural poor 
it serves. Kiva, a U.S. nonprofit peer-to-peer 
microfinance sensation, facilitates around $5 
million in no-interest loans a month to 
entrepreneurs in developing nations through its 
website. At one point, Kiva had to limit loans 
through their platform because the demand to give 
out loans was so high. Microfinance is yet 
another way the world is learning to share its 
wealth.

The Internet. It's easy to take it for granted, 
but its potential as a sharing platform has 
arguably just begun to unfold. The Internet 
itself would not be possible if people did not 
share labor, code, and infrastructure. No one 
owns it or runs it. It's built and it operates on 
free and open source software and open standards. 
Data travels over networks and is routed through 
servers owned by private individuals and 
corporations who share transport and routing 
duties.
This global commons enables the creation of 
tremendous value. Harvard Business School 
professor John Quelch estimates that the economic 
impact of the Internet is $1.4 trillion annually 
in the U.S. alone. This year, the Computer and 
Communications Industry Association calculated 
that companies and nonprofits relying on "fair 
use" (such as search engines, web hosts, and 
social media) employ 17 million people and 
generate $4.7 trillion a year, one sixth of our 
Gross Domestic Product.
All of that value is created on top of what is 
essentially volunteer sharing on a massive scale. 
As late as 1992, IBM did not think such a network 
was possible. Through its runaway success, the 
Internet has become the model for organizing life 
in the twenty-first century, as well as the 
essential infrastructure and distribution channel 
for commerce, ideas, work, and play.
And its influence reaches far beyond the online 
world. The Internet is reprogramming culture to 
the degree that society will likely be remade in 
its image, so that we have a better chance at 
thriving like it does. As you'll see by the end 
of this list, this change is already underway.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). FOSS and 
the Internet have a symbiotic relationship. The 
Internet would not have been possible without 
FOSS. And the growth of FOSS relies on the 
Internet to power its peer production and 
distribution model. Over 270 million people use 
the Firefox browser, a shared, freely available 
tool. Half of the world's Web sites, about 112 
million, run on Apache Server, also open source. 
A quarter of a million websites run on Drupal, a 
leading open source content management system.
That's just scratching the surface: Today, there 
are over 200,000 open source projects with nearly 
5 billion lines of code that would cost an 
estimated $387 billion to reproduce. Check out 
the Infoworld's Open Source Hall of Fame for more 
on desktop favorites, like Ubuntu, as well as 
obscure but vital infrastructure projects like 
BIND. You might also check out the Open Source 
Census, which tracks business installations of 
FOSS.
Today, millions of people and organizations rely 
on FOSS for their daily work, as do a growing 
number of governments. It's a pervasive part of 
life in the developed world-and because of its 
low cost, open source may become even more 
important to developing countries.

The Open Way. Inspired by the success of free and 
open source software, the values and practices of 
open source-making information and innovations 
publicly available-are being applied in a truly 
dizzying number of ways. In just the last few 
years, open or peer-to-peer sharing strategies 
have gained significant traction in science, 
business, culture, education, and government. 
Applications of "the open way" range from the 
obscure, like the open source tractor, to the 
everyday, like the OpenStreetMaps project. It's a 
tough trend to quantify because it is so viral 
and self-organized. To get a sense of the scope 
of the movement, check out the P2P 
Foundation blog or opensource.com.
The Obama administration's Open Government 
Directive is currently one of the most visible of 
these efforts, at least in the U.S. The 
directive ordered executive departments and 
agencies to identify and publish online in an 
open format at least three high-value data sets; 
create an open government web page and respond to 
public input received via that page; and develop 
and publish an Open Government Plan that will 
describe how they will improve transparency and 
integrate public participation and collaboration 
into its activities.

Social Media. Sharing is the currency of social 
media. And as the author of Socialnomics, Erik 
Qualman, says, social media is bigger than you 
think.
	*	More video was uploaded to 
YouTube in the last six months than was produced 
by the three major TV networks in 60 years.
	*	With over 400 million users, 
Facebook would be the fourth largest country in 
the world by population.
	*	Wikipedia has over 13 million 
articles, all written by volunteers-and with an 
accuracy that studies show is comparable to the 
best commercial encyclopedias.
	*	In 2008, one in eight newly 
married couples met through social media.
	*	Ninety-six percent of Generation 
Y has joined a social network, where sharing is a 
way of life.
	*	Creative Commons has made it 
easier for creators to share their work. They've 
licensed over 130 million creative works in 50 
countries since 2002.
In these powerful ways, social media has taken sharing mainstream.

Generation G. Now that a Shareable world has a 
serious foothold, all that's needed is a willing 
population to scale it up. There's a strong 
argument that Gen Y is the generation that can 
bring a shareable world to fruition.
Roughly 100 million strong in the United States, 
Gen Y grew up on the Internet and brings its 
values and practices, including sharing, into the 
real world. Last year TrendWatching.com called 
them Generation G (for "generous") and said they 
are accelerating a cultural shift where "giving 
is already the new taking." They may not reach 
their full sharing potential until later in life, 
but there are promising indicators:
	*	Sixty-one percent of 13-25 year 
olds feel personally responsible for making a 
difference in the world.
	*	Eighty-three percent will trust a 
company more if it's socially and environmentally 
responsible.
	*	Volunteering by college students 
increased by 20 percent between 2002 and 2005.
	*	Eighty-three percent volunteered in 2005.

Gary Hamel believes that this massive 
generational force, which outnumbers baby 
boomers, promises to transform our world in the 
image of the Internet, a world where sharing and 
contributing to the common good are integral to 
the good life. William Strauss and Neil Howe, 
authors of Millennials Rising, believes that Gen 
Y is a hero generation, coming of age in a time 
of crisis they're already helping to resolve, 
largely by applying the tools and mindset of 
sharing.

Neal Gorenflo and Jeremy Adam Smith wrote this 
article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit 
media organization that fuses powerful ideas with 
practical actions. Neal is the publisher of 
Shareable.net, a new online magazine that 
explores the ways that sharing is transforming 
life in the twenty-first century. Jeremy is the 
editor of Shareable.net, author of The Daddy 
Shift, and co-editor of two anthologies, The 
Compassionate Instinct and Are We Born Racist?, 
which Beacon Press will publish in August 2010.



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