Philip Colligan - 15.06.2010
Apparently the average productive time of a drill in its entire lifetime is about 12-13 minutes.
So why own a drill, when what you really need is a hole?
Isn't it better to rent a drill...or even better rent out your drill to other people who need a hole?
Just one of the examples that Rachel Botsman draws on in her excellent TED talk on the Rise of Collaborative Consumption.
Rachel describes the trend for the internet to create new platforms for people to share resources and assets. A big part of this is finding ways to create trust between strangers.
Remember life before Ebay? Would you have sent £10k to a total stranger on the basis of having seen a photograph of a car?
While Rachel's analysis focuses on commercial consumption, it's relevant to the future of meeting social needs too.
Three key ingedients:
- Matching needs and wants
- Maximising the value from untapped resources and assets
- Establishing the trust that enables mutual exchanges between strangers
Timebanking is just one area where the internet can create trust platforms that enable mutual exchange between citizens who are strangers.
Could an online marketplace for social care micro-enterprizes take the cost out of safeguarding and lead to better and cheaper ways of meeting social need?
As ever, thoughts are welcome.
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DGAmos
22 Jun 10, 11:34am (3 yearss ago)
This does make sense
A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting Prof Heinz Wolff on the board of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Professor Wolff shared a paper he had written promoting a very similar idea. His idea was based around younger people investing their time to provide social care services in their community, and "banking" this time to be retrieved when they required similar care in later years. I don't know if this idea developed further, but as you say, this has to be the kind of radical, community owned approach that will help us resolve the social care funding dilema. The challenge will be to create a sufficiently long term, reliable "banking" arrangement that people can trust will allow them to retrieve their investment in later years. The initial view might be that only government could do this, but why not the market or a social enterprise ? The technology has developed signficantly since Proff Wolff's paper was written and the recent emergence of online lending services indicates a developing maturity and appetite amongst the population for this type of arrangement.