Category Archives: Stories

About

News

Stories

Adopt and Support

Founders

Team

In Italiano

En Español

The Alpha Release

Have you ever Googled an address? Looked at a digital map ? Maybe you have even found a new restaurant with the help of your mobile phone? Ten years ago, this might have sounded like a fantasy. Today, you probably think that these questions look stupid…

Read on to learn about the experiences from the Swedish Map Jam, organised by DelaEko (Stockholm) and Kollaborativ Ekonomi Göteborg (Gothenburg), where sharing- and collaborative economy initiatives were mapped out in Sweden’s two biggest cities: Stockholm and Gothenburg.

Continue reading →

We are very pleased to present out first outside contribution to Sharitories “Stories”, this time given by OuiShare Connector and founder of Taxistop Angelo Meuleman , who has been actively following and participating in the first steps of Sharitories. Enjoy this cute story of how peer-to-peer mobility should not only be considered something for young hipsters with Smartphones.

We are looking for your stories! Do you know a cool initiative in your locality that you think contributes to a collaborative society based on fairness, openness and trust? Please send it to: info@sharitories.net

Marta and Lorenzo are the two co-founders of Collaboriamo! (Italian for Lets Collaborate!): one of the key organisations of the Italian sharing and collaborative economy landscape. Based in Milan, Collaboriamo works as a platform for sharing services, start-ups, companies, local authorities and citizens. In addition to organising big events like their successful one-day conference Sharitaly, Collaboriamo offers consultancy services to both companies and local authorities that wish to experiment with sharing models. Their latest project, which was further presented at OuiShare Fest 2014, is SharExpo , in which they outline in detail how the city of Milan may profit from using sharing services during the 2015 World Exhibition. Marta is further author of the book Collaboriamo (in Italian), which talks about how social media is helping people to survive in times of economic crisis.

We hope that the Sharitories project will give further ground for collaboration between OuiShare Italy and Collaboriamo, especially seeing all the great work that Marta and Lorenzo are leading in the north of the country. Read on to discover more about it in this interview!

I was lucky enough to catch April just before she took off for a month in Asia, including two weeks of trekking in Mongolia. She also had the courtesy to wake up in the early dawn (in San Francisco) to connect with me over nine times zones, something I learnt she has got quite used to in her frequent work with Europeans. Our conversation turned out to be extremely valuable, despite some slight interruptions due to a jumpy Skype connection, as our Sharitories initiative began to take shape. I am actually not sure who ended up asking more questions, April or myself, and as we hung up – or rather, the computer hung up on us – I was left with lots of considerations and ways to improve our focus in the forthcoming Collaborative Territories Toolkit.

For readers who might not know this important protagonist of the sharing and collaborative economy, April has long experience with “building bridges to transform society”, whether through means of sharing, innovation, microfinance or social enterprise. As a seasoned policy professional and strategic advisor, April has successfully built and scaled global initiatives, advised start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and local and national governments, and she was an early champion of social enterprise (see April’s Linkedin profile for more details). She is a member of the Sharing Economy Advisory Board for the City of Seoul, South Korea, as well as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, where she leads the sharing economy working group. In other words, April had lots of knowledge and food-for-thought to share with us before the official launch of the Sharitories initiative.

Neal Gorenflo is the co-founder of Shareable, “an award-winning news, action, connection hub for the sharing transformation”. Ten years ago, he left the corporate world to help people share through Internet startups, publishing, grassroots organizing, and a circle of friends committed to the common good. . He has consulted with Institute for the Future, Stanford University, Lowe’s Home Improvement, and numerous startups. He is co-editor of the books Share or Die: Voices of The Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis and Policies for Shareable Cities , the first sharing economy policy guide. Neal is an adviser to the US Solidarity Economy Network, OuiShare, Peers, Mayor Park of Seoul, South Korea and is a former Innovation Fellow for Mayor Lee of San Francisco. His huge skills and expertise made of him a “must interview” person in our path to build the Collaborative Territories Toolkit.

To say that Christian Iaione is a modest person almost seems like an understatement once you start listening to all the great work he is carrying out in Italy. Trained as a lawyer, Christian has since 2006 been involved in the non profit association “Labsus – Laboratory for Subsidiarity” and has founded in 2011 the think tank Labgov , Laboratory for the Governance of Commons, where he together with a team of around 10 young people graduating or graduated from LUISS Guido Carli University runs experiments of social and institutional innovation based on horizontal and circular subsidiarity, active citizenship, sharing economy, collaborative consumption, shared value, collective impact, collaborative governance and public collaboration,. For more details, you can read the Subsidiarity Charter here by scrolling down the page or read the The Commons Post hosted by www.labgov.it. Put briefly, it defines a new way of promoting the “general interest” through shared responsibility between public institutions, business, private citizens and community at large.

The most famous example of their work is probably from Bologna, which is part of their “Cities as a Commons” project that started in 2012. From an initial field study and three city-based “labs”, Labsus produced what has now become known as the Bologna Regulation on Collaboration between citizens and local governments: a comprehensive regulatory piece of 30 pages (soon to be published in English on www.labgov.it ), outlining how local authorities and citizens can manage urban public and private spaces and assets together. As such, it provides a sort of manual for collaboration, and a new vision for public administrations, and reflects the strong belief that we need a cultural shift in terms of how we think about government, sailing away from the use of public power towards governance and therefore the use of public collaboration and communication.

I was very happy to be able to meet Christian to have a chat in Rome, asking him about his experiences from working with public administrators and local politicians in the Cities as a Commons project.

Cecilia Tham wears several hats. She is the Director of MOB - Makers of Barcelona, one of the largest coworking space in the world – a coalition for the creative, innovative, and the entrepreneurs. She is also leading the FabCafe Barcelona that combines an innovative use for digital fabrication tools such as laser cutters, 3d printers and plotters, in an everyday environment such as the coffee shop . At the same time, she teaches Design Strategy and Management at Parsons The New School for Design , and we don’t know how she finds time to be the Design Ambassador at W Hotel Barcelona . With a group of student, she created the Hackable Cities Toolkit to re-imagine neighborhoods. This toolkit is extremely well shaped and quite close to the topics we are dealing with in our Collaborative Territories Toolkit. Cecilia Tham gives us direct, concise answers to move forward.

Gwendal Briand is co-founder of Collporterre , an association that aims to raise awareness about and implement the collaborative economy in local territories (see our introduction post for our understanding of territories in this context). He has conducted further research on local territories and collaborative economy by contributing to La Fabrique Ecologique (see Anne-Sophie Novel’s interview ), and is also a member of OuiShare , following his mission to connect the collaborative economy as Brittany Connector.

Marco Torregrossa is a man with many skills and occupations, which is probably why he has been referred to as a “creative practitioner in the EU affairs sector”. He is Managing Director at Euro Freelancers, a synergic network of independent EU affairs professionals and investors specialised in sustainability, collaborative innovation and crowdsourcing solutions, and Secretary General at European Forum of Independent Professionals, a non-profit collaboration of national associations, which represent independent professionals at EU level. On top of that, he is OuiShare’s own EU connector and helped organise of the series of sessions on Cities in the Collaborative Economy at OuiShare Fest 2014. He lives between Brussels and Moscow, the latter to which he aims to introduce ideas and practices from the OuiShare community.

It was thus with great curiosity and anticipation that I connected with Marco to hear what he had to say about our questions about policy-making and how to introduce the collaborative economy to local authorities. The ideas and practical advice were many, and our conversation jumped back and forth between the questions as one answered tied into another. Here is my attempt to sum up the many interesting insights gained during the 1,5 hours that Marco kindly dedicated to us.

Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang are the co-founders of ShareNL , a Dutch knowledge and networking platform that connects and informs initiatives from the sharing economy: consumers, businesses, organisations, governments, research institutions and media. Founded at the idea stage in 2012, in 2013 Pieter and Harmen set up the actual shareNL platform and started building on it. The team has now grown to include four more team members helping them in their work.

One important initiative started by shareNL is Amsterdam Sharing City. They work together with the city’s Economic Board, among a broad range of other local stakeholders, to make Amsterdam the first official “Sharing City” in Europe, following international examples like Seoul in South Korea and San Francisco in the US ( BayShare ).

In this interview, we asked Pieter and Harmen to share some of their experiences with this still relatively young project.

« Jul