Customer Reviews

What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

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One Saturday a friend who lives on Nob Hill in S.F. drove a zipcar over to visit me in Sausalito. He was eager to tell me about his trip to Istanbul, paid for by renting out his spare bedroom. Earlier that morning, via a freecycle posting, a stranger picked up some clay pots I'd set out by my garage so he could make a deck garden. Our apparently different actions are, in fact, part of a trend that Roos Rogers and Rachel Botsman dub collaborative consumption in their book, What's Mine is Yours.

Feeling pinched for money? Hate waste? Want to get to know more of your neighbors? These are just some of the reasons that might motivate you to discover fresh methods to save and to share that can also enrich your life - with others.

From bartering to exchanging, fixing, giving away, renting or more efficiently using what you have, this book is the most complete (and lively) resource I've found. You'll not only read about the better-known businesses and organizations that are tapping into "collaborative consumption" like zipcar and Meetup but many lesser-known groups and methods that you might join or reinvent to adapt to your situation or interest.

They write, "The collaboration at the heart of Collaborative Consumption may be local and face-to-face, or it may use the Internet to connect, combine, form groups, and find something or someone to create "many to many" peer-to-peer interactions. Simply put, people are sharing again with their community - be it an office, a neighborhood, an apartment building, a school, or a Facebook network. But the sharing and collaboration are happening in ways and at a scale never before possible, creating a culture and economy of What's Mine is Yours."

Collaborative Consumption appears in three "systems" suggest the authors, product service systems, redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles. The underlying principles that enable them are idling capacity, critical mass, belief in the commons and trust between strangers.

In keeping with a book on collaboration the authors seemingly productively co-wrote this book. You can read about the factors in our relatively recent history that caused Americans to shop as a hobby, often beyond our mean or needs and throw away or store our extra stuff (Americans average more than four credit cards per person while Europeans get by with 0.23 per person)- or you can jump to the many interesting characters, services, methods and stories in the rise of our collaborative consumption.

Some of my favorite stories are about business people who made dramatic changes on how they operated their business such as Ray Anderson who had a "conversion experience" after reading my friend Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, and transformed his firm, "the world's largest commercial carpet company" into "the first fully sustainable industrial enterprise." There are many fascinating back stories on how company founders backed into starting their business after personally seeing a need to reduce waste or save money - or others desire to share.

As someone who has had a long interest in collaboration I was delighted to learn how many more clever methods people are inventing to get along well on less, often through the use of collaborative technology. For example, I've been a longtime fan and user of freecyle, Zipcar, Netflix and Zilok (and was building up the nerve to try CouchSurfing or Airbnb) yet I'd not heard of many of the others including Snapgoods, SwapTree, SmartBike, TechShop, HearPlanet, iLetYou, SolarCity, UsedCardboardBoxes or OurGoods.

Perhaps like me, you'll finish this book convinced that sharing in all its forms is a major trend - and not just for the frugal or the greenies. Further you'll have specific ideas about why and how to share, exchange, rent, swap or ensure that the things you no longer want get into the hands of those who do. After you've read this book visit Shareable and see more stories to inspire you about how we are becoming more inventive about sharing the more we connect with each other about it. Relatedly, see Clay Shirky's Cognitive SurplusCognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Kevin Kelly's What Technology WantsWhat Technology Wants, Peter Block's The Abundant CommunityThe Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods and Delivering Happiness Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

This book provides a glimpse of the unevenly distributed future that already exists today. In other words, collaborative consumption is a phenomenon that will change the way we all live and work. This isn't just a technology-driven trend, although the Internet and ubiquitous computing are part of the picture. We're also in the early stages of a social transformation with respect to what people want. What's Mine Is Yours is filled with great examples, and the authors do a nice job of tying them together into an uplifting and important story. I highly recommend this book!

Ever now and then - not often - a book comes along that captures nascent trends that are going to effect us all before we know it, and lays those trends out with clarity and insight. 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' was such a book, as was 'Convergence Culture'. This year it appears we are blessed with two such reads - Clay Shirky's 'Cognitive Surplus', and this wonderful exploration of new (or re-emerging) forms of collaborative living.

The book is nicely structured and reads well, with an anecdotal style which clearly shows the huge amount of research that went into the project, drawing on an impressive range of case studies to make a powerful argument.

If the book has one failing it may be that, like so many 'business books', some people may overlook it as not for them. This would be a great pity, as the issues it deals with are critical for all of us - whether as inspiration for a collaborative dot com start up, or to help us navigated the increasing array of traded, swapped and shared products and services around us.

Buy it. Read it. Pass it on.

A new age of sharing and collaboration is upon us. Are you ready?

If not, you may find yourself left behind.

"What's Mine is Yours. The Rise of Collaborative Consumption" is an important new book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It explains how the extraordinary disruption caused by the communications revolution is spawning an explosion in sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping.

Sites like Couchsurfing.com, which co-ordinates swaps of 'couch' accommodation for visitors and travelers has become the third most visited travel site in the world.

Car-sharing services like Zipcar saw their membership triple in 2009, and it is estimated that by 2015, 4.4 million people in North America and 5.5 million in Europe will belong to similar services.

People are realising that they don't have to own everything themselves, and that reaching out to others and sharing saves them money, makes them feel good and makes them new friends.

It meets a fundamental human need for connection and sharing.

Even mega consumer brands like Nike are shifting their brand focus and advertising away from products and towards building collaborative communities, investing in nonmedia social hubs like NikePlus, where runners around the world post runnning routes, map their runs, offer advice and encourage one another. It is estimated that Nike is spending 55 per cent less on traditional advertising and celebrity endorsements than it did ten years ago.

So why is this change occurring? Botsman and Roo cite a number of reasons, one of which is that it
feeds what sociologist Marilynn Brewer calls our 'social self', the part of us that seeks connection and belonging.

People have a need to connect. We are essentially social beings. And after 60 years of what author Clay Shirky terms one-way media communication (television to us) the internet has given back some choice to consumers - and they're taking it.

Botsman and Roo posit that in 10 years people won't be judging each other by their credit rating but by their 'reputation rating' - what they give to, what they share and in what they participate. This will be a radical departure from the era of defining ourselves by the brands we display and the houses we live in.

There exists a huge desire for more meaning and connection in life.

Now is the time.

This is the most important book since "What would Google do?" and Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus". Read it or miss out on the next big thing.

BRILLANT !!!!!
This book has the world in mind ...NOT personal gain. Rachel Botsman does not talk down to us nor does she preach to us. She shows us a way to help save our world. The research that has been done is most amazing,extremely through, and very interesting. From beginning to the end, this book brings about so much emotion. How we have damaged this world and YET how to bring about the changes we need for the generations to come. It shows us how to have everything this world has to offer and how to do it simply and best of all how to do it on an extremely friendly basis.

It is a definite MUST READ!!!

A great book and a sign of our times, and times to come, but ironically it's not Kindle Lending enabled. Go figure...

The book is a very enjoyable read about the peer to peer collaborative consumption trend that's appearing around us.
I particularly enjoyed the summary of the theory about collaborative consumption. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to find out how this type of business/communities work.

The book makes some good points about collective intelligence, crowd sourcing and sharing, but the problem is if you are techie and have been following consumer market, you know it already..

Whether we can truly quit our habits of over-consumption is a moot point. Perhaps the halfway house is co-consumption or collaborative consumption. This book helps understand how and why this would be a good thing. In particular the book shows how, in our techno savvy world, we can engage with collaborative consumption through the various IT ways in which we can link with goods and services ('there's an app for that') and with each other. Importantly, how our individual profiles of reputation for honesty and reliability can be built through the trails of trust we create as we buy, sell, and share various goods and services. So that when we want to share a house or a car with someone, they can see whether this would be a good proposition. This book shows how we do this through 'trust banks'.

On the downside, the book contains a few too many openers like "Doris Swetzell was a successful academic but knew there was more to life, so she started "Share a moggie", a web-based outfit that loans cats to those who want a cat experience but not the fuss of cat ownership" (OK I admit, I just made this one up). But that sort of thing. While we need to know real case studies, I felt a bit slugged out with the number here.

But overall, this is a great book. I read it on a long haul flight from Auckland to Vancouver (feeling guilty about the airmiles I was clocking up). So to learn how to mitigate the environmental effect of other aspects of my consuming lifestyle by collaboratively consuming (and enjoying it) helped to assuage my conscience.

what i like about this book is the reintroduction of a concept that already exists. we grew up with sharing toys with our friends and salt with our neighbors. this concept is in the scale of one or more communities and formalizes as businesses. with the availability of technology, collaborative consumption is even more accessible for everyone. this book illustrates a series of good case studies and share businesses that are happening around us. if you are interested to learn about share economy, this book is a good starting point.