RelayRides meets GM meets Google

General Motors and RelayRides are teaming up to streamline the peer-to-peer car sharing process. The companies' exclusive relationship will allow millions of GM vehicle owners to rent out their idle cars through the OnStar mobile communication system.

RelayRides, a P2P car sharing service, already allows vehicle owners to choose rates and legally rent out their idle vehicles by providing an online marketplace and a $1 million insurance policy to make the transaction safe and convenient.

GM and RelayRides work together to develop a mobile app that will allow users to check for available vehicles, make a online reservation online, locate their reserved vehicle via GPS and lock and unlock the vehicle, all through their smart phone. RelayRides will leverage OnStar to allow borrowers to unlock GM cars with their mobile phones. The integration makes all eligible OnStar vehicles immediately "RelayRides ready" without having to install additional hardware.

In addition, Google Ventures has invested an undisclosed sum into RelayRides. August Capital also took part in the company’s first round of fundraising. This funding points to how fast automobile transportation as a product service system is evolving. There are now three generations of car sharing developing simultaneously - fleet based, peer-to-peer, and Google's automatic driving. And other big companies including Hertz, Daimler, and Enterprise have gotten into the game fairly recently creating hybrid services like car rental with ride sharing (take a passenger with you to lower your car rental cost).

"In addition to the significance of the Google investment to stimulating new investment in the space, the rapid growth of car sharing could accelerate the growth of the sharing economy in another way. Our New Sharing Economy study showed that car sharers share across significantly more asset categories than non-car sharers. This suggests that car sharing is a gateway drug to sharing. It echoes a consistent theme I see as publisher of Shareable, that sharing begets more sharing. In fact, sharing is viral. Once someone sees that it works in one area of life, they want to try it in another. And since you can't share alone, you take other people with you down the path to a more shareable way of life." --Neal Gorenflo Editor of Shareable

Sharing Cell Phones and Knowledge to Improve Healthcare in West Africa

Here's a high level case study around the development of a free tele-communications service that connects healthcare professionals in Ghana. In addition to the free network for doctors, Switchboard distributes directories to every doctor in the network, so they can find the right person in the country to communicate with when they need to.

Africa suffers more than 24% of the global burden of disease but has access to only 3% of health workers. With ratios as low as one doctor per 30,000 patients, they must be prepared to face a wide variety of conditions: high levels of disease, lack of basic supplies and medicines, deteriorating or substandard equipment, and, in remote areas, isolation from medical peers, One simple way to help is by providing better means for health professionals to share knowledge and collaborate with one another.

It's worth a read to understand the basic evolution of the service from a design and business development perspective. As well as creating a viable system based on strategic partnerships, the service is enabling a type of data collection that was before inconceivable. The SIM cards brought doctors into a calling network, and allowed Switchboard to track the specialties and locations of nearly every doctor practicing in Ghana. This was the first time this was possible in Ghana. They could see where all the OBGYN’s or pediatricians were located in the country, and how few surgeons there were. This data provided a broad view of the high-level healthcare needs, and served as the foundation for improving collaboration through their printed Doctor Directory, which was distributed to every doctor in the network.

Debt: The First 5000 years

David Graeber, in a recent article, provides a brief chronicle of the evolution of debt through credit, monetization and bartering. In his view, the idea that bartering preceded credit is a myth. This is likely because bartering was a fluid, on-the-spot negotiation which didn't generally result in an equal exchange but an "I owe you one" agreement. He asks then, "how does that broad sense of ‘I owe you one’ turn into a precise system of measurement – that is: money as a unit of account?"

By the time historical records are written in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3200 BC, it’s already happened. There’s an elaborate system of money of account and complex credit systems. (Money as medium of exchange or as a standardized circulating units of gold, silver, bronze or whatever, only comes much later.)

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets.

Graeber proposes the onset of credit from one of two places. One is what was found in Egypt: a strong centralized state and administration extracting taxes from everyone else. For most of Egyptian history they never developed the habit of lending money at interest. Mesopotamia was different because the state emerged unevenly and incompletely. At first there were giant bureaucratic temples, then also palace complexes, but they weren’t exactly governments and they didn’t extract direct taxes – these were considered appropriate only for conquered populations. Rather they were huge industrial complexes with their own land, flocks and factories. This is where money begins as a unit of account; it’s used for allocating resources within these complexes.

Interest-bearing loans, in turn, probably originated in deals between the administrators and merchants who carried, say, the woollen goods produced in temple factories (which in the very earliest period were at least partly charitable enterprises, homes for orphans, refugees or disabled people for instance) and traded them to faraway lands for metal, timber, or lapis lazuli. The first markets form on the fringes of these complexes and appear to operate largely on credit, using the temples’ units of account. But this gave the merchants and temple administrators and other well-off types the opportunity to make consumer loans to farmers, and then, if say the harvest was bad, everybody would start falling into debt-traps.

Eventually the Egyptian approach (taxes) and Mesopotamian approach (usury) fuse together, people have to borrow to pay their taxes and debt becomes institutionalized.

(Excerpt above from an interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.) For a full read of the article visit What is Debt from Naked Capitalism

Battered by economic crisis, Greeks turn to barter networks

The Economic Times just wrote a short profile on Volos, Greece who is responding to the country's precarious economic relationship with the EU, by developing alternative economies based on a blend of credit and barter. "Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market...People sign up online and get access to a database that is kind of like a members-only Craigslist. One unit of TEM is equal in value to one euro, and it can be used to exchange good and services. Members start their accounts with zero, and they accrue credit by offering goods and services. They can borrow up to 300 TEMs, but they are expected to repay the loan within a fixed period of time." The NY Times also covered this and added, "Members also receive books of vouchers of the alternative currency itself, which look like gift certificates and are printed with a special seal that makes it difficult to counterfeit. Those vouchers can be used like checks."

The Greek government is taking notice as citizens are designing economic safety nets that remove hard currency from the equation. This isn't an economic secession, but a pragmatic parallel economy based on collaborative behavior to share and exchange necessary services and goods to maintain their lives. Solidarity in the face of adversity seems to be the motivating force for the design of this service system.

Worth noting also is the sense of contribution that has been cited as a reason for participation. One member was quoted, "You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.”

Absolutely fantastic!

Upcoming Clothing Social in Braddock, PA

Give-and-Take will hold its second clothing social at Braddock’s UnSmoke Systems Artspace, October 8-9. If you're interested in thrifting, repurposing or donating clothing to the local community, please come and check us out. Over the weekend we will host:

• A clothing exchange where everything costs $1. Clothing comes from you, the public. All sizes. All genders. All seasons.
• A drop-off for your clothing donations. Looking to clear out your closet or make a contribution to your community? Your clothes make the exchange possible. So bring your clean, gently worn stuff to us. For a list of what we’re able to accept, please see our donation page.
• A mending circle where we can help you fix or change clothes you bring from home or score at the exchange. We’ll have comfy couches, sewing machines, and most importantly, mentors to help you do your thing.

Thrift. Donate. Mend. Or just hang out. The idea is for you stop by and be part of the mix. As a special treat, we’ll have the outdoor pizza oven up and going on Saturday from 3-5pm.

Would you be interested in contributing your skills? We’d love the help. We need sewing mentors; brave souls to make sense of all the donations; and all around ground troops to help us run the show. We have lots of opportunities. In thanks, we hope you’ll find some clothes you like at the social and fill up a bag for free.

Hours: UnSmoke Systems Artspace, 1137 Braddock Avenue, Braddock
Oct 8 Saturday 1-6pm
Oct 9 Sunday 1-6pm

Please contact us if you have questions or want to volunteer. You can also email us directly at giveandtakepgh@gmail.com

A portion of the clothing social’s profits will be donated to support the The UnSmoke Gallery’s ongoing renovation and programming efforts.

A Few Thoughts on the Maker Movement

A short article popped up at Shareable this weekend rephrasing some of the over-arching issues that explain how and why collaborative consumption, the maker movement, informal economies, etc. should be understood as something more than a trend, and instead, a quiet and steady r/evolution in how the world is and could be produced and shared. Thanks to a rise in a networked society, which is providing free or low-cost, instant access to open platform technical, fiscal and intellectual resources, we're now able to engage in personal- and community-based production in ways never experienced before. Specifically, the self-producers of the world, which were historically isolated from one another, are now producing at higher levels and collaborating in ways that are making real inroads on what society consumes. And whether intentionally or not, are prodding us to think about how we make our consumer decisions.

On one hand these collaborations are enabling self-sustaining mini economies to take hold or at a minimum, to be rigorously explored. (Think Smorgasbord). What's particularly interesting to me is that with these burgeoning, bottoms up options that are becoming available, issues like ethics, impact, and quality of life are giving price point a run for its money as decision-making criteria. On a more practical note, collaborative economies are reducing the need for middlemen, which helps keep prices and material use lower. And for consumers we're finding we don't have to be passive recipients of whatever the market dictates but have more value-aligning options and negotiating power around the stuff we want surrounding our lives.

The article offers the possibility that from this self-organizing and -producing approach, there could come more sustainable models of production and consumption. While applicable everywhere, there could be important implication for societies that lack the wherewithal to work with more traditional or institutionalized modes of production. I see this in my own neighborhoods throughout Pittsburgh where folks like DIY'ers and small-scale farmers are able to pay their bills through collaborative enterprises while exposing the community to some alternative consumer options--ones that say, whether deliberately or not, here is a way to do less damage or this is a more delightful way to go about living a life. I'm hopeful reading this article, knowing that competent visionaries and public facing figures are taking a step back to consider and communicate the implications of this shifting state towards collaboration.

Antonelli on Critical Design

Here's an excellent article voicing the role of Critical Design. In a nutshell, critical design undermines the default notion of design as an affirmative, commercially-oriented practice that shies away from thorny ethical issues. The field and practice, formalised by RCA faculty and design practitioners, Dunne and Raby, follows in the footsteps of radical design and architecture from the late 1960s and 1970s, but also marries it with a viable, rent-paying career. Antonelli continues, "The Critical Design process does not immediately lead to useful objects, but rather to food for thought whose usefulness is revealed by its ability to help others prevent and direct future outcomes. The job of critical designers is to be thorns in the side of politicians and industrialists, as well as partners for scientists or consumer advocates, while stimulating discussion and debate about the social, cultural and ethical future implications of decisions about technology made today."

Read the article for a high level introduction to the topic and some of the compelling and provocative projects that are circulating around cultural issues such food sustenance, self-image, and body politics. "All these examples, even the most apparently nihilistic ones, are characterised by deep empathy, trust in a possible better future, and a belief in the demonstrative power of well-designed utopias."

Thoughts for the Day

"Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment."

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

Thank you, Herbert Simon.

Why wouldn't you share?

I just stumbled upon Shareable, an online hub for showcasing ideas, conversations, projects and concerns around the blossoming culture of sharing. I'm going to spend some time pouring over this and will return with some thoughts. Please check them out if you get a second.

Openwear: A Collaborative Clothing Platform

After looking at Fashion Reloaded out of Berlin, I came across Openwear who is tearing it up around open source clothing production. This is real inspiration here with the following values:
1. Openwear is a collaborative platform for fashion creation.
2. Openwear is an online community where you can share values, access to knowledge and practice of collaborative and distributed work.
3. Openwear is where makers, fashion producers, small local enterprises, educational institutions can network to participating in the production of a new vision of fashion based on micro-communities and sustainability.

What's grabbing me is the two-fold contribution that Openwear is making to our culture. They are enableing open access to functional and creative ideas while practicing a new economy. In a recent blog entry of theirs, they discuss Adam Arvidsson's new book, "Ethical Economy" (Columbia University Press), in collaboration with Nicolai Peitersen. Their book introduces us to ethical economics and interprets the beginning of a new, radically different economic system in which production is mainly collaborative and social, and in which the value is based on the quality of social interactions and relationships rather than on the quantity of productive time.