Last Sunday my football team had an away match in Kent. Approaching half-time, one-nil down, I managed to break away from their left-back and found myself surging towards an undefended goal. Great.
Only it wasn't undefended for long, as I was soon heavily clattered from the left by what can only be described as a collosal blonde beast, with the sole intention of impeding, and hopefully flattening me before I could get a shot off. Seriously, all the grace of a wrecking-ball that girl.
My ankle, being my ankle, decided to give way under her horrendous, thunderous tackle and that was that; two torn ligaments, two months of no exercise and two fingers to the rest of the season. Great.
Oh and we went on to lose 6-1.
ANYWAY.
What's she on about... Well, during that exhilarating evening of resting, icing, compressing and elevating said ankle, I realised I'd have to go all the way to the hospital if I wanted to get some crutches so I could get into work the next day. I had planned to book an appointment at A&E so as not to clog up their long line of actually properly hurt people, but without the crutches, well I was a nobody, a slug. They had to be found.
And then I thought, I bet there's about a hundred pairs of crutches, lying there, unused, discarded after skateboarding accidents and drunken tumbles, hundreds I bet, within about a 2 mile radius of me right now. Right now. And just because I don't know in which houses or how to contact them, I have to schlep all the way to A&E and sit for hours to get my own crutches, and be told to go home and rest, ice, compress and elevate the foot that I dragged into the hospital.
Great.
Luckily in the end my mum remembered she had a neighbour who'd had a hip replacement a few weeks ago. Bingo. I hopped over there and pinched her crutches off her.
But I had to stay and listen to her go on and on and on about her hip replacement. And I wasn't in the mood, having just sustained my own injury, an involuntary injury I might add, and I concluded that my original idea of sourcing a stranger's unused crutches in the local area would have been much better, as they probably wouldn't have blabbered on at me, and they definitely wouldn't have told me how much I was starting to look like my mum.
I digress, again, but the moral of this story is, for whatever reason, we should share our unused stuff.
And no this isn't something I thought up by myself. Obviously.
You see...
About 6 months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk by a very switched on lady called Rachel Botsman; self-styled 'social innovator', figurehead of the 'Collaborative Conusmption' movement and author of 'What's mine is yours".
The basis of the movement is a change in the way we use and consume things.
The principal is based on three things:
1. There are lots of 'things' which people own or have access to, which are unused a lot of the time
2. The internet allows us connect and with others in instantly, wherever they are
3. The rise in networks like Freecycle and Couchsurfing show that we are increasingly partial to sharing stuff, and aren't always bothered about status and owning something to have at our disposal.
It's a really exciting and infinitely extendable idea. There are loads of examples of these collaborative networks already in action. There are car sharing networks like Streetcar; clothes swapping places like Styleswap and shared working space networks like Studiomates.
Ooh and one of my favourites, Skillshare, which is a place where people with skills or knowledge can organise classes for others to attend. Hopefully coming to the UK soon.
They're springing up all over the shop, and the best thing is, none of them involve a shop. They're all about sharing the idle resources, possessions, knowledge, amenities and spaces of individuals, so that
a. individuals can make a bit of cash
b. we can help each other out more easily
c. we can build trust and local connections
d. we can reduce the environmental impact of buying stuff
and c. we can move, slowly, from a world of materialism to one of 'collaborativeism'. Yay.
Or as Botsman puts it, from wanting to buy a drill, which will lie dormant for most of its life, to just wanting the hole in the wall, at a small price, when you need it.
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A Challange
So after getting all excited about this, I decided to give it a go, and am working on a new site with my friend Shane.
It will be a site where people can post up tasks, jobs and errands of any sort, for others locally to bid on. It could be for help with shopping, collections or deliveries, gardening, personal assistance, research, anything really.
The thing is, we don't know where we should launch it. The thought is that London is too big, and trust levels are pretty low. My instinct is that Bristol is the place. Good transport, quite affluent, quite liberal, lots of young people etc. Some think Brighton?
What do you reckon? Would be very keen to hear thoughts...?
x B
P.S. here's Rachel Botsman talking about sharing stuff. Watch it. http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
