New online communities are enabling collaborative consumption of goods and services through peer-to-peer sharing, trading, lending, leasing and swapping. Strangers can rent cars from each other, lease their bedrooms out to travellers, conduct chores for each other and even check in on other people’s hospitalised relatives. The peer-to-peer leasing market is expected to grow as consumers become part-time micro-entrepreneurs who lease out their seldom-used purchases (e.g. DIY tools such as drills).
Individuals can rate and recommend the people with whom they have done ‘business’ (see recommendation economy). This grassroots transparency builds trust which releases people to exercise goodwill and participate in these behaviours (see online trust and identity).
Concerns about climate change and global resource constraints prompt people to share products and buy fewer new products. The desire for community, local connections and conversation is also a driver. These websites are creating a new economy where the currency is goodwill and the theme is reciprocity.
What are the implications?
Increase in the use of reciprocity to incentivise volunteering, for example the increase in ‘time-banking’ schemes (see trends in volunteering).
Opportunities for organisations to facilitate peer-to-peer leasing of products and resources between their beneficiaries.
Ability to generate revenue through facilitating opportunities for peer-to-peer leasing of products and resources.
Increase in collaborative funding of new projects (see online collaboration).
Ability for individuals to save money through sharing products and services, potentially addressing poverty and inequality
Changing attitudes towards ethical living and consumerism as collaborative consumption potentially enhances or displaces other ethical behaviours.
Moving forward
With a growing emphasis on time as a currency for which people will expect to be remunerated with favours and benefits, voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) will need to think about volunteer retention and recruitment in a new light.
How can you reward and recognise volunteering?
Can your organisation plug into existing time banking schemes?
Beneficiaries of charitable services can share, trade, lend, lease and swap with each other.
How can your organisation empower current and former beneficiaries to share and exchange resources with each other?
Do you have former beneficiaries who have equipment, materials or resources which would be useful to current beneficiaries?
Collaborative consumption can generate online revenue for VCOs. Websites such as eBay.com and Couchsurfing.com that enable sharing, trading and other collaborative consumption behaviours can be highly profitable. Given the relative newness of collaborative consumption and its growth potential, there is scope for VCOs to promote these behaviours to their supporters.
Does your organisation have experience in offering non-traditional fundraising products to your supporters?
Does your organisation have a supporter base which could be further monetised?
What is it? A chart showing how people are increasingly growing up sharing files, photos, knowledge, and daily thoughts—and how these collaborative behaviours are moving into other areas of our lives.
How useful is this? This is an excellent overview of how collaborative consumption activities have grown and changed over the past 50 years.
What is it? Article by Rachel Bosman, author of Collaborative Consumption, on the growth of collaborative consumption.
How useful is this? The article gives a good overview of the tenets of collaborative consumption, including crowd-funding, redistribution and time-sharing.
Linked to this, I've just come across an interesting example of how digital impacts/is impacting on the process of writing books - the process used by Nina Simon to write the Participatory Museum. It began life as a closed wiki - she wrote chapters, they went through edits from other museum types. Then she turned it into an ordinary book that anyone can buy:
In a monumental act of self sacrifice, I missed the first half of the England vs. Slovenia on Wednesday in order to attend a conference on how randomised control trials - experiments to you and me - might help policy makers understand how we can get people (aka citizens) more involved in public policy. The title for what turned out to be a very good seminar was: Is it better to nudge or to think. The seminar was based on work by academics at Manchester and Southampton Universities, including Peter John and Gerry Stoker, who in the past has advised NCVO through his work on local governance. The findings from the research can be found at the Civic Behaviour website.
The researchers tested two approaches: the idea that we can 'nudge' people into doing more things by providing them with information 'cues' that encourage positive, so-called 'pro-social' behaviour. The idea that we can encourage - rather than compel - people to be good has risen up the agenda since the publication of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In the case of one experiment, the nudge was telling residents of a street how well they compared with a neighbouring street on household recycling. The second approach - whether we can get people to 'think' - asks whether citizens are prepared to engage in deliberation over complex issues. One example here included online-based deliberation forums where over a period of 10 days people were asked to discuss youth anti-social behaviour.
Anorak warning: a few words about methodology. I've referred to these as experiments: the important point here is that these interventions were all compared with 'control groups' were there wasn't an intervention so that the researchers could be reasonably sure that the nudge or think is actually leading to changes in behaviour. There are some people who think randomised control trials should be used by voluntary organisations to demonstrate their outcomes - I'd expect to hear more about this in relation to the outcomes/impact debate in future. By the way, experiments cost between £10-25k each.
So, what do these experiments tell us? The researchers argued that both nudges work particularly well. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) nearly all the nudges worked: so suggesting to people that their street might not recycle as much as the next street encouraged them to increase kerbside food recycling by 6%. Public displaying the names of donors who pledged to donate increase the rate of donations. I got the impression that deliberative exercises can work, but are less successful than nudging. Deliberation is clearly more time consuming and difficult and people's motivations for involvement are complex.
So what? Gerry Stoker made a really interesting point that stuck with me: citizens are willing to change their behaviour, help themselves and help others. People are far more civic minded and prepared to be involved than we give them credit for. The panel discussion, which included Phillip Blond, Matthew Taylor (who admirably left the seminar early to watch the football with his son) and the particularly interesting Toby Blume however highlighted some real challenges for those who to want to build the Big Society with either nudge or think. Questioners asked
•Nudge and think are aimed at solving mistrust in government - but what if
it is government doing the nudging or
running the deliberative exercises -
will people be less responsive because
of who is nudging or asking?
•Do nudges only work with simple, easy
behaviour changes, like taking rubbish
to your household boundary?
•Because these are experiments, do people behave in the way you want them to and therefore will the real world beless successful?
•If nudge and think encourage collaboration and consensus, where does that leave the engaged
citizens who don't want to be nudged -
what might term the awkward squad?
Much of the discussion then turned to issues of citizen engagement and the Big Society. I would particularly recommend that you have a look at Kevin Harris' write up of this part of the discussion - like Kevin, I was somewhat surprised by some of the comments about a lack of trust in society and the lack of architecture for engagement. NCVO and many others have said this time and again, but just because people don't practice civic engagement it doesn't mean they practice civil engagement. People are prepared to get involved, and they have many reasons for doing so. But they have to feel it is worth it.
One last thought. At the end I talked with the excellent David Wilcox about whether we were trying to overcomplicate some of this: fundraisers always say that despite reams of research on donor motivation, the reason people give to charity is because they are asked. David's response was a very simple typology:
Those interested in finding out more about the project might want to have a look at our recent progress report which describes some of the observations and reflections emerging out of the initial stages of the project, focusing on how participation is organised and the roles and understandings of the institutions and facilitators of participation.
Megan
Collaborative consumption
New online communities are enabling collaborative consumption of goods and services through peer-to-peer sharing, trading, lending, leasing and swapping. Strangers can rent cars from each other, lease their bedrooms out to travellers, conduct chores for each other and even check in on other people’s hospitalised relatives. The peer-to-peer leasing market is expected to grow as consumers become part-time micro-entrepreneurs who lease out their seldom-used purchases (e.g. DIY tools such as drills).
Individuals can rate and recommend the people with whom they have done ‘business’ (see recommendation economy). This grassroots transparency builds trust which releases people to exercise goodwill and participate in these behaviours (see online trust and identity).
Concerns about climate change and global resource constraints prompt people to share products and buy fewer new products. The desire for community, local connections and conversation is also a driver. These websites are creating a new economy where the currency is goodwill and the theme is reciprocity.
What are the implications?
Moving forward
With a growing emphasis on time as a currency for which people will expect to be remunerated with favours and benefits, voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) will need to think about volunteer retention and recruitment in a new light.
Beneficiaries of charitable services can share, trade, lend, lease and swap with each other.
Collaborative consumption can generate online revenue for VCOs. Websites such as eBay.com and Couchsurfing.com that enable sharing, trading and other collaborative consumption behaviours can be highly profitable. Given the relative newness of collaborative consumption and its growth potential, there is scope for VCOs to promote these behaviours to their supporters.
Want to know more?
Collaborative Consumption
Published by: Oxygen Consulting
Date: 2007
Format: PDF
What is it? Article by Ray Algar on consumers’ growing awareness of their collaborative power and the impact this will have on product pricing.
How useful is this? The article is a thought-starter for fundraising managers considering new ideas.
Sharing Is Contagious
Published by: GOOD Design
Date: 2010
Format: Web
What is it? A chart showing how people are increasingly growing up sharing files, photos, knowledge, and daily thoughts—and how these collaborative behaviours are moving into other areas of our lives.
How useful is this? This is an excellent overview of how collaborative consumption activities have grown and changed over the past 50 years.
The Everyday Entrepreneur
Published by: The RSA
Date: 2010
Format: PDF
What is it? Article by Rachel Bosman, author of Collaborative Consumption, on the growth of collaborative consumption.
How useful is this? The article gives a good overview of the tenets of collaborative consumption, including crowd-funding, redistribution and time-sharing.
Kathryn
From Paper to Pixels
Linked to this, I've just come across an interesting example of how digital impacts/is impacting on the process of writing books - the process used by Nina Simon to write the Participatory Museum. It began life as a closed wiki - she wrote chapters, they went through edits from other museum types. Then she turned it into an ordinary book that anyone can buy:
http://www.participatorymuseum.org/ and also as a free online document.
(This was brought to my attention by Kate Smith).
Karl
The future of participation?
In a monumental act of self sacrifice, I missed the first half of the England vs. Slovenia on Wednesday in order to attend a conference on how randomised control trials - experiments to you and me - might help policy makers understand how we can get people (aka citizens) more involved in public policy. The title for what turned out to be a very good seminar was: Is it better to nudge or to think. The seminar was based on work by academics at Manchester and Southampton Universities, including Peter John and Gerry Stoker, who in the past has advised NCVO through his work on local governance. The findings from the research can be found at the Civic Behaviour website.
The researchers tested two approaches: the idea that we can 'nudge' people into doing more things by providing them with information 'cues' that encourage positive, so-called 'pro-social' behaviour. The idea that we can encourage - rather than compel - people to be good has risen up the agenda since the publication of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In the case of one experiment, the nudge was telling residents of a street how well they compared with a neighbouring street on household recycling. The second approach - whether we can get people to 'think' - asks whether citizens are prepared to engage in deliberation over complex issues. One example here included online-based deliberation forums where over a period of 10 days people were asked to discuss youth anti-social behaviour.
Anorak warning: a few words about methodology. I've referred to these as experiments: the important point here is that these interventions were all compared with 'control groups' were there wasn't an intervention so that the researchers could be reasonably sure that the nudge or think is actually leading to changes in behaviour. There are some people who think randomised control trials should be used by voluntary organisations to demonstrate their outcomes - I'd expect to hear more about this in relation to the outcomes/impact debate in future. By the way, experiments cost between £10-25k each.
So, what do these experiments tell us? The researchers argued that both nudges work particularly well. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) nearly all the nudges worked: so suggesting to people that their street might not recycle as much as the next street encouraged them to increase kerbside food recycling by 6%. Public displaying the names of donors who pledged to donate increase the rate of donations. I got the impression that deliberative exercises can work, but are less successful than nudging. Deliberation is clearly more time consuming and difficult and people's motivations for involvement are complex.
So what? Gerry Stoker made a really interesting point that stuck with me: citizens are willing to change their behaviour, help themselves and help others. People are far more civic minded and prepared to be involved than we give them credit for. The panel discussion, which included Phillip Blond, Matthew Taylor (who admirably left the seminar early to watch the football with his son) and the particularly interesting Toby Blume however highlighted some real challenges for those who to want to build the Big Society with either nudge or think. Questioners asked
Much of the discussion then turned to issues of citizen engagement and the Big Society. I would particularly recommend that you have a look at Kevin Harris' write up of this part of the discussion - like Kevin, I was somewhat surprised by some of the comments about a lack of trust in society and the lack of architecture for engagement. NCVO and many others have said this time and again, but just because people don't practice civic engagement it doesn't mean they practice civil engagement. People are prepared to get involved, and they have many reasons for doing so. But they have to feel it is worth it.
One last thought. At the end I talked with the excellent David Wilcox about whether we were trying to overcomplicate some of this: fundraisers always say that despite reams of research on donor motivation, the reason people give to charity is because they are asked. David's response was a very simple typology:
•If you want people to give, ask them
•If you want people to act, support them
•If you want people to talk, listen
David
Power to the People? The Big Society agenda
I'm developing a wiki here http://designingforcivilsociety.wikispaces.com/
and bookmarking http://delicious.com/socialreporter/bigsociety
Véronique
Understanding participation
A little while ago I posted something about the 'Pathways through Participation' publication Understanding review: a literature review.
We have now completed 4 summaries outlining the review's key points:
Those interested in finding out more about the project might want to have a look at our recent progress report which describes some of the observations and reflections emerging out of the initial stages of the project, focusing on how participation is organised and the roles and understandings of the institutions and facilitators of participation.