Shareable Dec. 24: Your Holiday and Heating Questions Answered

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Resources For Last-Minute DIY Gift Ideas
If you celebrate Christmas, you’re probably down to the wire, rushing from one mall to the next. Fortunately, there are still alternatives to holiday traffic and spending money you may not have on unnecessary trinkets. Shareable’s covered a few of these alternatives recently, but if you’re still looking for items to stow beneath the tree, the Internet is a treasure trove of DIY gift ideas.

Find solutions to your pre-party gift crises here


Six Ways to Stay Warm without Central Heating

The D.C. metro area got more snow last Winter than ever in recorded in history, and with an unexpected week off school and nowhere to go, my four housemates and I had to find a way to make our drafty house snowpocalypse-proof. The problem? After a through-the-roof Fall bill, we had agreed to use the expensive central heating sparingly. After much trial, tribulation, and shivering, we found some solutions and survived the season. Here are a few extremely DIY ways to save on your heating costs this Winter, as tested under extreme conditions on live college students. 

Click to find out how not to freeze for free and fun (one of the tips is forts!)


The Sting Operation

We had barely reassembled curbside when I felt a disturbance in The Force. My iPhone. I could picture it on the empty seat beside us. I’ve gone on and on in past blogs about my guilt regarding my phone, and about how I rationalize holding onto such a ridiculous indulgence. Some people keep their car, and I decided instead to keep the phone I got when they first started discounting them. I hang my head in shame; please feel free to bombard me with well-deserved admonishments and criticisms. In a panic I dashed into the nearest building, which happened to be a nursing home.  By this time, I was pouring sweat, we were late for our meeting, and I was integrating the growing realization that I was probably going to lose my phone forever.


America's Top Walking Cities

A couple weeks ago I highlighted a list of the World's 6 Best Cities for Walking, compiled by a forward-looking tour operator. Not a single American city made the list, which is no surprise given our longstanding national tradition of accommodating automobiles in every way possible. But it would be a disservice to the U.S.—and the facts themselves—to leave you with the impression that Americans don’t like to walk. Actually, given a safe comfortable place to hoof it, we are enthusiastic pedestrians. More and more people want streets that can be shared by motorists, walkers and bicyclists-- that's the goal of a growing movement called Complete Streets.

To see if your hometown is on Jay Walljasper's nice list, click here


Your eBook Is Watching, But Is That Necessarily Bad?

Many folks will be receiving iPads and Kindles for the holidays, but is that actually a surveillance device sitting beneath the tree? NPR reports that your eBook reader may be watching you back, reporting your reading activity, highlighted passages and even GPS location back to the manufacturer. Following Amazon’s PR nightmare last year when the company remotely deleted copies of 1984 from Kindles, people are justifiably freaked out by the Orwellian overtones of books that report back to Big Bezos. But in the rush to demand more accountability from eReader manufacturers, let’s not dismiss the social aggregation tools these technologies can enable.

Click here to read Paul Davis's defense of big brother books


Attack of The Enclosure Trolls

I know when I run into angry, aggressive, and plain old mean commenters online ("trolls," in the common parlance), I usually assume some unfortunate cocktail of personality disorders, excessive leisure time, and Red Bull. But in an article up at ZSpace, George Monbiot suggests I might be underestimating their co-ordination, that what appear as isolated if not uncommon cyber malcontents are at least some of the time a paid group of virtual henchpeople in the employ of major corporations or even governments themselves. Here's a sample from Monbiot's call to "Reclaim The Cyber-Commons" from these dastardly trolls and their bosses.

To read about the trolls behind the trolls, click here


This Week in Sharing

TWISHere are stories from the week we didn't have time to cover, but we think you might enjoy. This week includes SimCity-style urban planning as a musical instrument, a new Creative Commons CEO, tryouts for a big San Francisco bike-sharing contract, New York middle schoolers going past the class goldfish to the class aquaponics fish farm, and thirteen world city guides for your smartphone free for the holidays.

Click here for these stories and more


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to malcolm (at) shareable.net!


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Shareable Dec. 10: Holiday Gifts without Stuff

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Ten Shareable Gifts for The Holidays

Should we keep buying more stuff for our friends and family that they don’t really need? The holidays often bring on either the guilt of having enough money to buy expensive gifts or the stress of paying for them if you don’t. Then there is the question of ethical shopping: Where did these gifts come from? What resources were used? How far where they shipped? How much did the workers get paid? Were they bought from corporations? Do these gifts build community values or further materialistic desire, especially in children? Are they helping to usher in a new economy or keeping us chained to the old economy?

Click to read Mira Luna's 10 anti-gifts


World's Best Walking Cities for Travelers

Last week I visited Dayton, Ohio, to give a talk to planners and public officials about ways citizens can improve their communities, and found it to be a pleasantly surprising city with lively historical neighborhoods and one of the country’s most extensive networks of recreational bike trails as well as economic woes. After my talk, a man from one of Dayton’s suburbs asked me to distill my 24 suggestions—ranging from better public transit to making communities more dog-friendly—down to one or two top priorities.

See Jay Walljasper's top-ten walkable cities here


Five Kickstarter Projects to Support Today

Leaders, artists and creative entrepreneurs have plugged into Kickstarter, a relatively new funding platform that utilizes a new form of patronage sometimes called crowd funding. With an all or nothing proposal, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. The following are unique projects seeking backers now that are, well, Shareable!


Are Retailers Complicit in The Sale of Conflict Minerals?

As the holiday season kicks into high gear, the issue of conflict minerals is worth reconsidering. As we’ve discussed previously on Shareable, conflict minerals are materials found in many of our tech devices and gadgets sourced from war-torn places including the Congo. The sourcing of these materials directly funds genocide and continued violence. New rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission demand that companies and retailers disclose that they are using materials from such sources.

Find out more about the proposed regulations on conflict minerals


Open Source Hardware

The phrase 'democratizing the creative process' has been raised more than once over the last decade. The idea of enabling information, knowledge and resources as free accessible commodities is gradually becoming one of the 21st century's biggest movements. Gradually digital tools are becoming more common, user friendly and free. All in all bottlenecks of distribution and production are beginning to dissolve. In this environment the hardware industry is about to enter its own disruptive era. The growth of this change however is not based entirely on the improvement of the machines but rather on wider cultural aspects.

Click here to read more about open-source machinery


... And Satellite Internet for All

When we think of human rights, we usually think of life staples (food, water, shelter) and freedom from oppression (speech, worship, association), but as I argued last week, that's just not good enough to allow everyone to take part in a global conversation. Ahumanright works to provide internet access to the five billion people without it because they believe the ability to get online is just that: a human right. In their efforts to secure a free internet connection for the world's dispossessed, the group has come up with an idea that sounds both logical and completely crazy: buy a satellite.

More on this Bond-villain style plan here


This Week in Sharing

TWISHere are stories from the week we didn't have time to cover, but we think you might enjoy. This week includes Fall-themed DIY spa treatments, what happens when fifteen shapoholics quit buying new clothes for a year, instructions on how to build your own bamboo hut, electrified car-sharing, and the recession's production of a new minimalist attitude in America.

For theses stories and more, click here


Shareable Dec. 3: Community-Fed Babies Edition

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How Hosting a Babyfood Swap Saved My Sanity and Fed My Kid

I barely have time to write this story, never mind puree several batches of vegetables and grains every week. Like so many of us, I’m part of a working family. A typical workday for me ends at 3:00, where the baby and I race out the door to pick up my son at preschool. We return home at 5:00, ingredients in tow to slap together a healthy, semi-delicious meal for our family dinner hour at 6:00. Then bath, bed, dishes laundry, 30 minutes of Colbert…rinse, repeat. This temporal juggling act is difficult, but magically just-manageable every day. Toss an additional element into the mix – such as the need to create an entirely different menu of prepared first foods for my infant son – and the daily schedule comes to a crashing conundrum.

Click to read about Karen Solomon's solution to her babyfood dilemma


The Worst Kind of Fool

Earlier this week I wrote a self-pitying blog post for shareable.net about my Thanksgiving. I’m happy to say that it didn’t get published before I had a chance to review it and revise it. Below are excerpts, which I’m embarrassed to share, but shame is sometimes an important emotion to feel, I think. It’s corrective, like guilt. The key is not to let the guilt and shame overwhelm your ability to improve yourself and your behavior. Let’s call this an exorcism...

Read Corbyn's holiday exorcism in prose here


How Science Can Use Your Help

I always imagined science and the understanding of the current state of our ecosystems to be the role of the scientist. Somehow I had convinced myself that science was to occur in some obscure basement laboratory or in some fancy bureau on the top of a hill or within the intimidating gates of a University. Now I know that when it comes to understanding the state of ecosystems, science can actually use my help! It all started with poop. Yes, that is right I got pooped on, literally.


From The Story of Stuff to The Story of Sharing

Shareable was inspired in part by the viral video, The Story of Stuff, which shows the destructiveness of our consumer economy. Now just a couple years after it was released, there's many voices telling the story of sharing. Below are four of our favorite videos about the commons, collaborative consumption, and mesh networks.

Click to watch these four videos


More Than a Check Box: Social Media and Gender

The open-source Facebook alternative Diaspora has been released upon the world (or at least a handful of test users) with a private alpha release. Reviews have been predictably mixed for a piece of software that’s still a long way from beta, yet one of the more unexpected debates is over the decision to allow users to define their gender using an open text field. This references a long-running greivance against Facebook on the part of queer and transgendered advocates, who state that the social network’s man/woman binary distinctions do not account for the wide variety of gender and sexual identities and expressions. 

Click here to read about a gender expression and social media


Why The Intellectual Commons Isn't Good Enough

When writing about the commons, one is likely to stumble into some awfully strange bedfellows. The last place I expected to find an attack on the institution of intellectual property was the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a far-right libertarian think-tank. And yet, there it is, right on their site: "Ideas Are Free: The Case against Intellectual Property," a lecture from the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society by Stephan Kinsella. What would make a free-market fundamentalist oppose any kind of right to property?

For more about property, abundance, and the commons, click here


This Week in Sharing

TWISHere are stories from the week we didn't have time to cover, but we think you might enjoy. This week includes the minimalist case against buying Christmas presents, America's higher education crisis, a Beijing college graduate's novel hovel, the difference between the commons and socialism, and a new partnership that will have serious consequences for Canadian car-sharers. 

For theses stories and more, click here


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to malcolm (at) shareable.net!

Shareable Oct. 22: The sharing economy is coming

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This week we have more from Shareable's New Sharing Economy study and seven ways sharing resources can make you happier. Plus: The revelatory power of a push-mower and managing domestic stereotypes. 


Study Reveals Big Opportunities in the Sharing Economy

The New Sharing Economy study surveyed 537 participants for their current engagement and future interest in sharing across industry categories. Based on this data, the top opportunity areas for new service offerings were interpreted as those with both high latent demand and low market saturation: time, household goods, automobiles, money, and living space...

Click for more on these results and how every business can learn from this study


7 Ways Sharing can Make You Happy

Though it might seem that there’s not much in the way of silver linings in these dark economic times, there is at least one: as people learn to make do with less, they are discovering the many benefits of sharing. Car-sharing, babysitting cooperatives, and tool lending are just a few of the many creative ways people are eschewing ownership and learning to share the goods and services they need. But sharing can do more than just save you a buck. New psychological research suggests that sharing fosters trust and cooperation in the community and contributes to personal well-being. Here are some of the ways that sharing can boost your happiness levels and help your community thrive...

Read Jill Suttie's seven ways here


Sometimes a Lawn Mower Can Change Everything

We might not have bought it if our gas-powered one had been working, but it had mysteriously stopped functioning two weeks before, and we were watching our weedy front lawn grow long and feeling reluctant to part with the cash to buy a replacement. But here it was, a choice we could make: fifteen dollars for a simple, people-powered option...


Stereotype Me

It started when Joe got a television job and I was working from home, labeling my officelessness modern and “mobile.” I was a graduate student, which meant that besides going to class, my work consisted of reading and writing, which I accomplished in bed or at my desk—two feet from the bed ... The result was that Joe had to be at an actual desk at a specific time, while I could stay in my pajamas much of the day. Ergo, I became the breakfast-maker...

See how Astri Von Arbin Ahlander and her husband Joe struggle with stereotypes and the balance of culinary labor here


World of Giving: A Q&A with Jeffrey Inaba

In his new book World of Giving, architect Jeffrey Inaba writes that "Giving permeates human activity. It is present always and everywhere." What exactly is giving, though, if it is both economically ubiquitous and socially universal? "Giving," Inaba suggests, "is any act that improves the capacity of another person. A gift can be as little as a nod of encouragement, or as great as taking a bullet for a friend."

Click here to read Jeffrey's interview on gifts and architecture with Geoff Manaugh


This Week in Sharing

TWISHere are stories from the week we didn't have time to cover, but we think you might enjoy. This week includes a burgeoning fast-food union, the death of the parking meter, science in the city, the argument for building vertically in DC, preserving buildings by taking them apart, and a contest looking for your best recycled bicycle inner tube innovations.


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to jeremy (at) shareable.net!

Shareable Oct. 8: Talk to Strangers and Other Good Advice







This week we have a sneak peek at Douglas Rushkoff's new book, PLUS: worker co-operatives, friendly strangers, and a week's worth of sharing news.


From Utopia to Everywhere

co-opThe dire nature of the economy and limited government intervention available to help distressed workers have left people looking for grassroots solutions. Whereas the co-op movement of the 1960s and 1970s had a more utopian, separatist bent, increasingly what she sees are workers excited about cooperatives as a way to be a part of the economy on their own terms...

Read more about the co-op movement here


Program Or Be Programmed

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Shareable presents an excerpt from Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Douglas Rushkoff’s introduction to his bold-yet-accessible work. On Tuesday, October 12, Shareable will run an exclusive interview with Rushkoff, followed with an online discussion on October 13 and 14 between Rushkoff and the entire Shareable community.


Click to read the excerpt from Rushkoff


Why Talk to Strangers?

david byrneIn the second piece in Arianna Davolos's series on her Stranger Dinner project, she examines loneliness and ways to solve it: "It soon hit me that school hadn’t prepared me for the reality that lay beyond. In the real world, people didn’t have time to make art. Work that actually earned money took over life ... Working part time in a frame shop, and spending my free time working on projects alone at my house, I felt a very basic, almost laughable question begin to surface. What is everyone doing?"

Continue Arianna's Stranger Dinner Part II here


"Little Tasks"

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What we have forgotten in trying to completely equalize society, we've created a sort of politically correct neutrality that is anything but "equal" in its valuation of tasks. Often only the much-denigrated "little tasks" of life are the ones over which conversations can be heard. When everyone is competing to perform the higher-status "intellectually demanding" tasks that require an intense focus, no one has time to stop and laugh over a joke, nurse a child, or notice that someone is feeling depressed and needs help.


eBook Hype vs. Reality

Poe? Poe.Has the hype surrounding eBooks grown severely overblown? Absolutely, states technology writer Christopher Mims at MIT’s Technology Review, who writes the exuberance around the Kindle and iPad is little more than an effect of an accelerated hype bubble. Mims writes, “Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015, inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached?”

Click to read Paul M. Davis's deflation of the eBook bubble  


Is Social Media Catalyzing an Offline Sharing Economy?

BikersThe results of Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicate that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.

See more on the report's findings here


This Week in Sharing

TWISHere are stories from the week we didn't have time to cover, but we think you might enjoy. This week includes a rebel co-op bus, public space for crime reduction, the value of painful love in the digital era, a DIY Halloween contest, and a potential (and fungal) replacement for plastic.


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to jeremy (at) shareable.net!

Shareable Sept 2: Is a gift economy sustainable (and legal)?






Let's make money soup! This week in Shareable.net, attorney Janelle Orsi explains how to mix a sharing economy from a few simple legal ingredients. PLUS: Tips from Stephanie Smith about how to reinvent your neighborhood!


How to Barter, Give, and Get Stuff

soup"There are things we do for money and things we do for free. And then there is everything in between. In that between-space, there is a growing and exciting  'third economy.' I thought it would be a fun and important project to sort out the tax, business, and labor law implications of these 'in between' transactions. However, when I got knee deep into the research, I found that things got rather soupy."

Explore the legalities of the third economy now!


How to (Legally) Open a Gift (Economy)

grimgift3"Giving and receiving gifts is the simplest way to get started in informal economy, because giving is something we all do naturally. So how might you get started? One way is to simply let your friends know you are exploring a gift-based economy, and tell people what you need and what you have to offer. Don’t ask people to pay you back, but do encourage them to pay it forward!"

Learn the legal nuts & bolts of gifting now!


Is a Donation-Driven Creative Economy Sustainable?

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"We’re over a decade into the digital music revolution, and there’s a million ideas of how to compensate artists in a post-label world, but no sure bet. Big-name artists like Radiohead have successfully distributed albums directly to the people using pay-what-you-want schemes. Other artists with smaller fan bases like Kristin Hersh have also enjoyed some success with a donation model. But as pleas for donations increasingly dominate my social network news feeds, I’m curious whether this new donation-driven creative economy is sustainable."


How to Reinvent the Potluck

homesharing_0"Why a potluck? The potluck is an iconic community gathering experience that symbolically reinforces the idea of sharing, as each guest brings food to share with the group. And anyway, potlucks are fun! Here are some ideas on how to 'reinvent' the simple potluck format so you can use it as a launch pad for neighborhood sharing."

Discover how potlucks can help build community!


Group Power: Tap Into It!

groupon"One big reason to get neighborhoods organized for sharing is the money neighbors can save when they operate as a group. When they're organized with intention, neighbors can start to utilize group economic techniques, and save big. Here’s why… If you’re in a group you’ve got access to economic power. You can negotiate a discount with a merchant, you can barter, you can resource-share, and more..."


Home Renovation, the Shareable Way

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"Waste from home building and renovating constitutes approximately 57 percent of landfill, says Stephani Carter from EcoAmmo, an Alberta-based company specializing in sustainable research and education for the built environment. 'People aren’t taught how to properly divert materials from the landfill,' she says."


Learn how to renovate with less waste now!


The Tenacity of Pirate Radio

radiotransmitter2"So what will you hear on Pirate Radio in 2010? A lot of stuff you won’t hear anywhere else. The voices of people who have found themselves on the ass-end of the digital divide. Activist shows such as Democracy Now. Experimental and avant-garde music too jarring for even the tastes of college radio DJ’s. And, to be fair, a lot of hopelessly unprofessional broadcasters, with some rather eccentric things to say. Which is, of course, the key to the form’s charm."


Three Technologies that Pluck Resources from the Air

lightning"Air is the ultimate commons, something that no one can own and that everyone can access. But cruising through new discoveries on ScienceDaily, I discovered that we can get much more from air than just breath. Here are three cutting-edge technologies that allow us to pull resources right out of the air."


More on the United Nations Bikesharing Plot

bikelane_dd97"A month ago, we mentioned that Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver’s efforts to launch an extremely successful bikesharing program are, in reality, an evil plot to convert 'Denver into a United Nations community.' This being the twenty-first century and all, it didn't take long for an alert citizen to create a video dramatizing the Republican's courageous stance against bikesharing..."


Children Imagine the Future of Technology

13339_1293326175346_1296044515_864548_8002009_n"Shareable's research partner Latitude conducted a very original study of what children want from technology. At first glance, the questions and the answers they provoke seem, well, child-like: Of course, the kids want the world, they want the whole world, and they want today and tomorrow. But the Latitude study reveals some deeper things going on, which are nicely summarized in this video..."


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to jeremy (at) shareable.net!


If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please reply to this message with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line or simply click on the following link: Unsubscribe

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Shareable Aug 26: When Your Community Lets You Down





This week in Shareable.net, we explored what happens when sharing fails, and we looked at concrete steps to take in making the world a more shareable place. PLUS: Vote for our SXSW panel on the New Sharing Economy!


How Do Things Ever Change?

pic2acc"How to find good ideas? There are good ideas for new ways of living more sustainably out there, in apartments, blocks, parks, community centers and even local businesses. However, these good ideas are often hidden. They might be concealed by being part of an ethnic group, or part of community formed around other non-sustainability focused interests – a support group or fan club or class through which people get to know each other and start to help each other with transport or accommodation or sharing equipment."

Explore different paths to a better world now!


Six Ways to Start Sharing

whats_mine_is_yours_cover_1"Resource-sharing can be deeply fulfilling, but also frustratingly difficult, especially at the outset. If you happen not to be in one of those hotbeds of sharing innovation like Portland, Berkeley/Oakland or Brooklyn, how do you start sharing (and with whom) in a way that gives you the most chance of success? Here are a few ideas on getting started..."

Learn how to start sharing now!


When Your Community Lets You Down

sweaterhead 2"One of the most amazing things about the process of our economic downsizing has been how embraced and supported we feel by our friends, neighbors, and surrounding community. It seems, here, that if we raise our hand and say, 'I need this. Can you help?' that our community collectively answers 'yes.' That’s why it has been so surprising on the rare occasion that we’ve been betrayed by that same community."

Read the latest in Corbyn's Great Recession diary!


When Bikesharing Fails

www.flickr.comphotoscarlosfpardo_0 2"When Barcelona's Bicing was inaugurated, people signed up for memberships by the thousands. There were many more users than bicycles in 2007, and often times I would arrive at a station and there would be no bike available, or the one that was would have a flat. Bikes were the targets of vandalism and robbery. If it wasn’t the whole bike that was stolen, it was the bell, the seat, the pedals. This high demand meets low-quality combo was made worse by frequent glitches in the computerized bike checkout system, as well as a lack of bike culture in the city."

How did Barcelona's bikesharing program learn from its mistakes?


3 Ways Social Bicycles Could Transform Bikesharing

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"I talked with Ryan Rzepecki about his revolutionary Social Bicycles System, or SoBi for short. As  bikesharing technology has evolved from easy-to-steal 'White Bikes' on the streets of Amsterdam to 'third generation' systems that rely on GPS to track a kiosk-based fleet, bikesharing programs have spread, and the SoBi technology could potentially bring bikesharing to many more cities and towns. Here are three interlocking ways that SoBi could transform the future of bikesharing..."


What is the future of sharing bicycles?


How to Share Your Car with a Stranger

screen1 2"Growing up in the city of Providence, Christina Lively’s parents always set an example by encouraging their children to use public transit, instead of using a car. As a part-time musician, she owns a car so she can transport her equipment to and from gigs, but for the rest of the time the car sits idle. When she heard about RelayRides, an online peer-to-peer car-sharing platform based in Cambridge, she was excited by the thought of offering her rarely-used car to someone in the community."


What Lost Generation?

original_image_2_1
"It's true employment is down, and we have more debt than previous generations - education, ecological, credit card, etc. But we're being judged on recently failed economic paradigms: measuring growth, creditworthiness, even what is and is not valuable within or to a society are all paradigms that are now in transition. The media is quick to trumpet how the financial system and most of the things we know about economics are now defunct, so why is it still making value judgements on those paradigms?"


Why We Started GiftFlow

hexagons_1"Here in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, there are hundreds of people living within one mile of the coffee shop where we wrote this essay who lack access to some of the most fundamental human needs. At the same time, hundreds more are frustrated with the way consumption has taken over their lives and cluttered their homes. The abundance of stuff that is the result of our consumption driven culture could potentially be used to not only help friends share with friends, but to change entire communities."


Please Vote for our SXSW Panel!

critical-mass-by-mona-caron1"Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine dedicated to promoting sharing as an empowering lifestyle and effective social change strategy. With our partner Latitude Research, we recently launched a survey on the new sharing economy. We hope to discuss the results of the survey at the SXSW Interactive conference next March in a panel entitled, 'The New Sharing Economy.' And identify the obstacles and opportunities to creating a way of life based on sharing supported by innovative businesses."


Enter the Collaborative Consumption Book Review Contest!

whats_mine_is_yours_cover_4"We're excited about the launch of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, a new book that charts a powerful groundswell of traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. We have teamed up with the authors to give you the chance to win a copy of this important book before its release on September 14th, and reinvent the way book reviews are done."


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to jeremy (at) shareable.net!

Shareable July 29: Welcome to Shareable Island!

 
 


Dear friends, 

This week in Shareable, we've been exploring islands -- one without cars, one that aims to become the world's most sustainable neighborhood. PLUS: A profound and challenging conversation with best-selling authors Novella Carpenter (Farm City) and Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia).

 


Can a City Build a Better Version of Itself?

09_aia_honor_awards_03
"The Treasure Island redevelopment aims to build the most ecologically sustainable community in the world. Renderings in the master plan of gleaming towers, parks, and gardens suggest harmony, community, and sustainability. Yet the promise of an urban Treasure Island, one of the most complex and risky developments in San Francisco’s history, has for more than a decade been wrapped up in a process driven by power and influence."


Lessons from Car-free Fire Island

35039_415910692091_699557091_4532497_7162724_n"The absence of cars means that bicycling has become part and parcel of the life and culture of Fire Island. It is home to scenes that are sadly vanishing from the American landscape. Kids ride bikes, with or without a destination, on their own. Businesses and stores use cargo bikes for hauling and deliveries. Visitors use wagons to transport their luggage and groceries. So does Fire Island offer a model for making other communities car-free, or at least, more bike-friendly?."

Explore car-free Fire Island now!


The Weeds of Ecotopia: A Conversation with Novella Carpenter & Ernest Callenbach

IMG_3192"In my world, the apocalypse has arrived. There’s abandoned buildings, there’s broken glass, it’s f***ed up. But then at the same time you’re like, 'What can I do with this?' I’m just doing what I can right now while I’m feeling good, but I have no sort of delusions that this can continue, because I’m squatting on this land and I’m just getting what I can out of it while I can. I wanted to prove that you could do something in a city that was considered to be a rural activity like raising goats or ducks or growing food."

Read our Q&A with Novella & Ernest!


The Downsides of a Shareable Life

featurecorbyn"Like the preserved fifties in Cuba, we have visible reminders of an epoch now passed. The laptop has lost long stripes of pixilation. The gen-1 iPhone won't accept the latest software updates. The memory-foam mattress is stained and sagging. But there are Cubans who keep their faded, fifties-era American cars running all these years, and we are trying to minimize the effects of our own trade embargo by fixing things, caring for what we have, and ignoring the frustrations of planned obsolescence."

Read the latest entry in Corbyn Hightower's Great Recession diary!


Will Flipboard Transform Social News?

ipad_screenshot

"Providing relevant social news remains a tantalizing but elusive goal for developers. There are many services that aggregate shared news items from across the Internet and highlight the most-discussed stories of the day. But popular news and relevant news are not the same thing. What we need is a service that aggregates the shared items across our many social networks to bring us relevant news as chosen by our friends, not an editorial board or an impersonal popularity algorithm. The social news iPad app Flipboard aims to do just that."


What the heck is Flipboard and why is it useful?


Why Electronics Recycling is Energy Stupid

iPhone"When you hold an iPhone, you're holding something with tremendous embodied energy. Therefore, it's extremely wasteful to simply melt them down to their raw materials at end of life. Instead, it makes more sense from an emergy perspective to design such complex devices for modularity and reuse modular components in new devices. This calls for a platform approach. Sharing and reuse also conserve the energy that has already been invested in an object and the energy that would be needed to dispose and recycle it."


How to Tent-Surf Your Way to an iPhone

Chris_Bank_in_tent"On Tuesday, June 22, Chris Bank set up his two-man tent outside San Francisco’s Stockton St. Apple Store. Hoping to just cover the costs of his new phone, Chris listed the spare spot in the tent at a reserve price of $200 on Airbnb, a peer-to-peer travel platform. Airbnb began in late 2007 as an idea between two flatmates, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, who rented out their spare space to a few international design conference delegates because every hotel in San Francisco had reached capacity."


Treasure Island: A Case Study in Shareable Journalism

featurepublicpress"We published the Treasure Island investigation in the first print edition of Public Press on June 22, 2010. One hundred and fourteen individuals donated $2,768 to support the story through Spot.us, matching contributions by nonprofit organizations. The significance of increasingly common collaborations like this one goes well beyond the subject of the story. We’re telling another story, too, about the future of journalism: networked, nonprofit, crowdfunded, de-institutionalized, and collaborative."


There's a new culture and economy emerging where sharing and contributing to the common good are the priorities. At Shareable.net, we believe this shift is exactly what's needed to help us overcome the grave social and environmental crises we face today, and perhaps thrive as never before. We hope you'll join the conversation on Shareable, by commenting on articles or even submitting your own articles to jeremy (at) shareable.net!