What’s mine is yours

I’ve just finished reading “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It’s thought-provoking and highly readable. Many of its peers are the former, but rarely the latter, and for this reason I’ll admit that I was putting off reading it, even though it’s a must-read for me. So I was pleasantly surprised when I read it cover to cover in a day: couldn’t put it down.

What distinguishes it from so many earnest tomes telling us to reduce waste, reduce consumption, be good and wear a hairshirt, is that it understands that this revolution has to be lead by consumer demand and great design, and that excellent profits are there to be made by companies who understand this. Given the enormity of the issues facing our planet, it is also hugely optimistic.

It lays out the context for the need for change: why we’re in this un-sustainable mess and why it doesn’t need to be this way. Then it leads you through the major ways we can reduce consumption:

• product service systems – such as car clubs like Zipcar and ridesharing like Liftshare
• redistribution markets – such as ebay, freecycle and swapping sites like swishing
• collaborative lifestyles – co-working (such as Jelly), finance (such as Zopa) and websites like landshare, parkatmyhouse and yours2share.

I found the sections on trust particularly useful and I’m waiting to see the first reputation platform emerge, bringing together our reputations on ebay, zopa, couchsurfing, relayrides etc. Ironically the only area of sharing that wasn’t really covered was the creation of private syndicates and sharing of large assets between small groups of private individuals similar to the sharing enabled by yours2share.

If you want to do your bit for the planet, understand the part that a large chunk of the internet plays in this, or find out where your company should be heading, it’s well worth reading.