Wednesday, March 07, 2012
By Katherine Madden
After a day at GBCA's Green Cities conference in early March,
I've had plenty of time to reflect on the ecletic mix of
presentations, thoughts and aspirations. The most striking thing to
come out of the conference for me was Rachel Botsman's thinking on
"Collaborative Consumption". Its a wonderful concept based around
satisfying our desire for access and meeting our needs without
owing stuff. And the evidence out there is that the shift is
already happening. Not all of us want to own cars, we'd rather use
car share serices such as Go Get. We don't necessarily want to own
the CD but we want access to the music that it holds. Sound
familiar? Well this is what Rachel has observed and what she speaks
about. She also points out that some of us want to out-source our
tasks, which has given rise to websites like Task Box
www.taskbox.com.au. We live in a very connected
age with on-demand access to information and people. Rachel
discribes this as the means which is enabling the shift away from
owning stuff to sharing and enabling access to things.
According to Rachel, she came to this thinking in 2008 around
the time of the start of the global finalnial crisis, when it
became obvious to her that we were reaching the limits to growth of
our planet, out of which she osberved people wanted to become more
connected with their community, resolve environmental concerns.
Its happening all around us, but Rachel has cleverly pieced it
together and describes it as Collaborative Consumption. Check out
www.collaborativeconsumption.com. You can alos see plenty of
Rachel's presentations at www.rachelbotsman.com,
www.ted.com/talks/view/lang///id/1037