To all directors etc of sharing websites

-Invitation to dinner on March 26th -near UK Aware 2011 conference:

Dear Sam from Streetbank & fellow key campaigners generating a more sharing future,

I'm prompted by Cat Fletcher of Freegle to invite you all to a 2nd annual dinner out (co-inciding with the UK Aware Ethical Living event) in London on Saturday 26th March; my second preference being Friday 25th March.(What's your preference?)

Cat writes:

I take days off to get to various conferences and events but all in all it is relentless, I am working the weekend of UKAware but I guess I could come up to London after work and have a meal, it would be great to see you and talk...maybe you can rope in some others to join us (if you'll be at UKAware during the day)...food for thought! cat x

  Videos about building-trust in communities through freelending, freecycling, peer-to-peer renting etc:

facebook app idea -I offer and I want

Like "6 degrees of separation", a test of Facebook might be how many possessions does someone need to offer on average before a want is met. Perhaps it's 5, for example. Are you willing to offer 5 things to your facebook friends for every want you have?
Instead of just clicking on Amazon or ebay, why not build with your friends the inventory of what you are wanting, and preface this with an inventory of what you are offering.
By building the inventory of a database of what you are offering & making requests for what you want, I'm  confident that you and your friends will save money and get more connected.

Just as Ecomodo had their biggest publicity breakthrough after they offered an iPad on-line, when making your offers, try stretching yourself in terms of offering things that are valuable and likely to be wanted. Choose popular items that you could do without for a few days or more eg:

• a car
• a beachhut
• an Amazon kindle
• an iphone
• best-selling DVDs or books 
• a range of tools and sporting/camping goods.

All of the above are available on freelender.org by the way; out of the car, beachhut, kindle, and iphone list, it's amazing to me that only the iphone -bought by Freelending CIC benefactors- has been borrowed so far!

If friends on facebook were aware of this perhaps this would change!

Until the facebook app is built by you or someone else, why not just use ecomodo.com for listing your wanted items and streetbank.com for posting your offers oin facebook and available to the other 6000 members of streetbank?

Ecobees - vote in the poll on the left when you've tried it!

Here's a review of Ecobees (if you get beyond the innuendo!):


On the Lend-It-All Man site the review of three other sharing websites is as follows:  

Reviews of lending websites

• www.freelender.org- special features: trust stats, all items are free, values of all items are listed (minimising later difficulties); mediation service provided in case of difficulty

• www.ecomodo.com – special features: you can easily arrange for your favourite charities to get money from rental of household items. {NB I expect my favourite charity, www.karuna.org to be added to the site shortly!}

• www.letsallshare.com – special features: lets you list items as rental or giveaway, which makes this site more optimum in terms of listing all your stuff then managing it.

Overall review:

What I advocate as sharing technology steps forward for society includes the following:
-the development of a culture in which we itemise all our stuff and offer it to others, recognising how this serves us
-trained community activists who promoting this on the doorstep and provide connections from which they take commission. (This commission -raised eg from the rental charges of a street sharing a co-created car pool) may, for example raise the money for the ongoing development of better 'stuff management solutions' or simply go to favourite charities through the money
-technology that 'saves' you from buying new things (eg a version of sites like ebay or Amazon that linked to your social networking eg Facebook- the function of which would be to let you know which of your friends already had what you were about to buy, hopefully disuading you from buying it -unless it's an iPhone:-)

To return to the quote from my alter ego, Lend-It-All Man (everything I own you can borrow):

The necessary ‘stuff management solution’ goes beyond what is provided by any of the above sites; what will get us closer to a strong way forward would be an amalgam of our resources into a bigger and better site.
Failing that, we at least would benefit from forming a consortium of some sort. For more on this theme see: www.twitter.com/sharingandgifteconomics.com

As a director of Freelending CIC I also believe that the future lies in an optimum ‘fractional ownership solution’ which starts from having an effective place where people post their ‘wanted’ messages and an effective way to build trust to share items not used all the time. I look forward to the discussions as to how this happens in the near future, for all our sakes."

Please now vote in the poll on the left about whcih site serves your sharing needs best?

The problem with hubris and being two steps ahead

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted as follows:

You've heard of #Freecycle & #freegle ?The next step IMHO is #letsallshare & beyond that, us #freelender.org.

Being a 'clever clogs' often irritates and confuses others who can only see the next step. (ie I end up tripping.
As Edmund and I are now agreed that LetsAllShare.com is currently a more credible site than freelender.org at present, questions arise like:

1. Whether I put all my thousands of items on that site, instead of (or in addition to) freelender.org?
2. Whether I advertise freelender.org primarily in my neighbourhood and advocate letsallshare nationally?
3. What mix of websites is going to best serve the 'Sharing and Gift Economics' sector of the economy? 
4. What is the most responsible thing I/you can do in relation to the gap between where we are now in how we share resources and where we need to be ASAP?

As well as commenting below, please see (& join) the occasional twitterstream: http://twitter.com/gifteconomics

Please feel free to distribute this Avatar-Freelender leaflet on behalf of all freelenders

•  Here's a link to the pdf file we produced of the leaflet text below
  
• Here's the Freelender Community Page, which also includes the link to the leaflet; feel free to distribute on behalf of all freelenders; either outside cinemas showing Avatar, or just through neighbours doors.
  

What difference does the James Cameron film Avatar encourage you to make to your life?

Who is the character in the picture: Neytiri or.........................................?

(other interpretations welcome on the shared Facebook discussion started by Paul Crosland on 12/1/10)

"The Na'vi have a closeness and community that we, in our solitary, high-tech squalor, have lost on earth.

If we learn nothing else, we must learn again to trust when everything in our diminished lives says we can't."

  "Avatar - An Activist Survival Guide" - request your free copy at freelender.org

Also available - 'The Age of Stupid' DVD.

Now that governments lacked courage in Copenhagen, the UK release of the 'Age of Stupid' is a call to reduce consumption. Reduced consumption can increase the quality of life if we become more consciously inter-dependent in our world (and less dependent on the well-being of an unsustainable economic system).

The 'Age of Stupid' (staring Pete Postlethwaite) film is about the world in 2055; though the exact date of that level of environmental and cultural destruction is of course dependent on what you do with this leaflet.

Who is the character in the picture: Neytiri or..........?(other interpretations welcome on the Facebook discussion started publically by Paul Crosland on 12th January 2010)

"I see you, I depend on you and I'm looking for something bigger than a 'win-win' outcome.

Let's work together for systemic win i.e. No losers." 

(Paul Crosland,co-director of Freelending Community Interest Company)

Whatever you want, ask to borrow it.

Whatever you have to share, offer it.

Gain friends and build trust locally.

freelender.org

-and also try these other UK wide (or wider) websites, all of which are being invited to join a consortium of community organisations with a mission of caring for how household resources are used:

• Freecycle UK - uk.freecycle.org
  
• Freegle UK - ilovefreegle.org
  
• Freeconomy - justfortheloveofit.org
  
• LetsAllShare - letsallshare.com