Summer is on us in British Columbia which means that shared things like sailboats, kayaks, trailers, tents, swimming pools, and tennis courts that don't get used for much of the year are in high demand.

If you share any of these types of things -- or anything else -- please post about your experiences in our main forum.

Enjoy the summer.

Here are four steps to solving a storage problem or to obtaining the use of something you need.

1A. Think of something that is taking up space, that you don't need immediately, and that you would be happy to lend provided you get it back. (An old car or boat, sports equipment or facilities, books that have been read, power tools,....almost anything.)

OR

1B. Think of something you need and would be willing to return if you could use it for a while at low cost. (Car, kayak, ping-pong table, power saw,...)

2. Using "Add a sharing interest" at SharableThings create a sharing interest with "(rbs - rubber band sharable)" or "(rbs - rubber band sharable - wanted)" at the end of its title. Don't forget to attach a photo. Let's imagine you create "Old Dining Room Table (rbs - rubber band sharable)" as your sharing interest.

3. People contact you and come to see Old Dining Room Table.

4. You and your chosen borrower enter into a short "lend-borrow" agreement. There is a sample agreement here that you can customize and that provides for a contribution to charity and the SharableThings service. Under the terms of the sample agreement, you can request Old Dining Room Table back when you want.

Try sharing a "rubber band sharable" today. Its not difficult.

The Wildlife Rescue Association of BC is the first charity in our List of Charities.

Help us figure out a policy regarding charities in the forum thread "List of Charities - How should we choose charities?".

Mac's small animal cage trap has been lent to lmckenna on what we sometimes call here a rubber band sharing arrangement.

SharableThings has been cut from the New Ventures BC 2010 business ideas competition.

Its hard not to feel the bite of this failure, but we are grateful to the competition for taking us outside our comfort zone and introducing us to some great people.

Vince has re-worked our landing page. We hope you like it.

The new appearance does not reflect more ambitious revisions that Vince has in mind but, in the spirit of agile software development, we hope it will do for this week.

Martin and Vince sent news from the sharing world today.

Vince saw a twitter about Share Some Sugar which seems to provide functionality like the "rubber band sharables" here at SharableThings.

Martin saw an article about another car sharing service, this one in the UK, called whipcar.

New sharing tools are coming on the scene at a furious rate.

The New Ventures BC 2010 business ideas competition continues with events most Tuesday nights into June.

Our second round submission went in to the competition last night.

At events so far, we've met three other competitors. Each of them is a great guy with a cracker-jack business idea.

Ken has a promising cure for cancer. Mike is designing a simple refrigerator to save food waste in the third world. Matt's company, Zeros2Heroes, tests ideas for television series in a way that makes expensive pilot shows unnecessary.

We feel as though we entered a soap box derby and discovered our neighbours can build Ferraris, Porsches, and Lamborghinis.

It is marvellous, if daunting, that there is such talent in the competition.

Early this week, SharableThings user jenly posted a sharing interest with "bowling" as its title.

Jenly is looking for people to go bowling with.

The signficance of what Jenly's sharing interest was saying didn't become clear until later in the week when a footnote jumped off a page.

The footnote referred to a book called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Some extracts from the the book's publicity make things clear:

"In a groundbreaking book based on vast new data, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures-- and how we may reconnect. Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities."

"Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors have contributed to this decline."

"The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all "social networks" [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other. "

"Factoids from Bowling Alone"

"Family dinners and family vacations or even just sitting and talking with your family are down by one third in last 25 years."

"Having friends over to the house is down by 45 percent over last 25 years. "

"Participation in clubs and civic organizations has been cut by more than half over the last 25 years."

"Involvement in community life, such as public meetings is down by 35 percent over the last 25 years."

"Church attendance is down by roughly one third since 1960s."

Keunholee's television, mac's boardroom table, and small coastal cruising sailboat have in common that their owners don't use them now but might in the future. For now, these objects are taking up space that the SharableThings users keunholee, mac, and sg.cmac want to put to better use.

Enter the "rubber band sharable".

A “rubber band sharable” is something you don’t want to get rid of, because you suspect you might want to use it at some time in the future, but which is cluttering up your house or occupying space you could use for other purposes. Furniture, old vehicles, art, television sets, other equipment, are good examples of “rubber band sharables”.

Here's how you deal with such a creature and can feel good about it.

Create a sharing interest at SharableThings with the usual photograph of the sharable. (Rubber band sharables are photogenic!)

Append the expression "(rbs- rubber band sharable)" to the title so that everyone gets the idea.

Quite often "rubber band sharables" will share for free, in which case you will probably put "freeshare" somewhere in the description of your sharing interest.

However, "free" is a bit of a misnomer, because part of the arrangement is that you, the lender, agree with the borrower the value of the borrowing to the borrower (the "Agreed Borrowing Value"); and the borrower sends two cheques, one mfor 75% of the Agreed Borrowing Value made payable to a charity (see the wiki page List of Charities) as a charitable donation and one for 25% of the Agreed Borrowing Value made payable to SharableThings Inc. to help run this service.

In order to make clearer the nature of the rubber band, in your sharing interest you might indicate the amount of notice that you will give to get the sharable back and the amount of notice that must be given to you when the sharable is to be returned.

Once you have listed your rubber band sharable, another SharableThings user should come along wanting to borrow it and to solve your storage problem – until you want the sharable back or it is returned to you.

Most of us likely have a few “rubber band sharable” candidates lying around. By creating sharing interests out of them and lending them out, we may slowly get used to living without that priceless junk.

[There is now a sample "Rubber Band Sharable" agreement in the wiki pages at this site under the heading "Agreements for Lending-Borrowing a Sharable, Giving to Charity, and Supporting the SharableThings Service"].

Wikipedia is wonderful as a sharing institution.

Just now there is a very specific reason for saying so from a sharing perspective.

The Wikipedia article on sharing cites an essay by Yochai Benkler that appears at pages 273-358 of volume 114 of the Yale Law Journal.

Entitled “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production”, the essay describes “shareable goods”, which Benkler defines as “a particular class of physical goods…that systematically have excess capacity”.

Yochai Benkler offers a tall glass of water to anyone who has thirsted for definitions regarding sharing.

Sharing is a desert of language, a desert of definitions, that Benkler, a professor at Yale at the time he wrote the essay and now the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, sets out to make familiar to us through definition. For most of us, the result will follow the adage of Walter Lippmann that we don’t see and then define but define and then see.

In subsequent postings, some of Benkler’s insights may be commented on but for now a few quotations from near the beginning of “Sharing Nicely” will have to suffice.

“The characteristics I use to define shareable goods are sufficient to make social sharing and exchange of material goods feasible as a sustainable social practice. But these characteristics are neither absolutely necessary nor sufficient for sharing to occur. Instead they define conditions under which, when goods with these characteristics are prevalent in the physical-capital base of an economy, it becomes feasible for social sharing and exchange to become more salient in the overall mix of relations of production in that economy.”

“I suggest that social sharing and exchange is an underappreciated modality of economic production…whose salience in the economy is sensitive to technological conditions.”

“My own concern is how a particular subclass of indivisible goods…creates a feasibility space for social sharing…”

“…both markets and managerial hierarchies require crisp specification of behaviors [sic – warning to fellow Canadians and British subjects we are dealing with American spellings here] and outcomes. Crispness is costly. It is not a characteristic of social relations, which rely on fuzzier definitions of actions required and performed, of inputs and outputs, and of obligations. Furthermore, where uncertainty is resistant to cost-effective reduction, the more textured (though less computable) information typical of social relations can provide better reasons for action than the persistent (though futile) search for crisply computable courses of action represented by pricing or managerial commands. Moreover, social sharing can capture a cluster of social and psychological motivations that are not continuous with, and may even be crowed out by, the presence of money. Pooling large numbers of small-scale contributions to achieve effective functionality – where transaction costs would be high and per-contribution payments must be kept low – is likely to be achieved more efficiently through social sharing systems than through market-based systems. It is precisely this form of sharing – on a large scale, among weakly connected participants, in project-specific or even ad hoc contexts – that we are beginning to see more of on the Internet; that is my central focus.”

"Social sharing and exchange is becoming a common modality of producing valuable desiderata at the very core of the most advanced economies..."

"Once we come to accept the economic significance of this cluster of social practices, we will have to turn to mapping internal variations and understanding their workings and relationships to each other as economic phenomenon.....For now, however, all we need is to recognise that a broad set of social practices can be sustainable and efficient substitutes for markets, firms and bureaucracies."

The “Sharing Nicely” article begins to de-mystify, by defining, some of what is going on in terms of sharing in our economy. Whether its analysis will have much practical application to the specific complex of legal, social, economic, and technical problems that a website like www.sharablethings.com faces, it is nonetheless gratifying to hear Benkler's voice calling directions to lost souls wandering in this peculiar little-defined place (sharing) in the middle of our economy.

RK wrote today to say, "You should ...have a look at these sites...: http://www.letsolla.com , http://www.timebanks.org/how-it-works.htm , http://hyperlocavore.com/ , http://www.zwaggle.com , http://www.u-exchange.com , http://www.swaptree.com , http://www.tradeafavor.com , http://sharetompkins.wordpress.com , http://www.flexicar.com.au , http://www.goget.com.au , http://www.orix-carsharing.com.

We tried to enter SharableThings in the 2010 CBC Dragons' Den, a "reality" television competition show for business ideas. The online entry attempt failed, which gave more time to research the show by watching old episodes, which in turn led to the conclusion that SharableThings and the Dragons' Den would make an unlikely couple.

To judge by a sampling of old episodes, the series follows a predictable formula. Usually a nice person, who has spent too much money to develop a product of questionable usefulness, accompanied by his family or a quiet friend or business partner, demonstrates and pitches the product.

The pitch reveals obvious flaws, which make the audience feel as wise as the entrepreneurs (the dragons) who are the competition judges (Star Chamber) and are to decide whether to invest their own money. The dragons' questioning uncovers the flaws and makes the proponent (with whom the audience now identifies) squirm. The proponent is devastated -- or occasionally defiant, in which case he comes in for special ridicule. Each dragon refuses to invest, declaring, "I'm out".

Occasionally, a dragon smiles and accepts a proposition, and a deal is done.

It leaves you aching for a St. George to wipe the floor with the dragons.

The tone is more polite, and less analytical, than the English version of the same show. The Canadian dragons come across as clear-eyed tight wads.

A waterless egg cooker on the English Dragons' Den series (it couldn't cook an egg) seems the archtype of the show's favourite business idea.

It seemed unlikely that SharableThings would be selected to enter the Dragons' Den, although we found ourselves secretly sharpening our sword. SharableThings does not have a simple product.

The Dragons' Den is television. While the Canadian show is quite nice (no Donald Trump or Simon Cowell here), hard thinking about difficult business models is not what it is about. The stakes are kept low and the playing field wildly uneven. It would be refreshing to see strong proponents with complex business proposals asking for serious money and causing havoc among the dragons, but that would not be television.

We ducked the Dragons' Den, afraid of falling on our sword?

Within minutes of each other today, boat sharing moderator Gerry Thorne and LexPublica founder Martin Ertl sent news from the sharing front.

Gerry has been reading two articles by Chris Cannon in The Tyee: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2010/20/AllTogetherNow and http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/04/20ShareTactics/

Martin has been reading in Springwise about P2P car sharing coming to Australia (http://springwise.com/weekly/2010-04-21.htm#drivemycar) and a neighbourhood sharing service in Southern California (http://springwise.com/life_hacks/neighborgoods).

Accountant James Topham (Vancouver), open source advocate Zak Greant (Vancouver), and Internet business consultant Harry Max (Mountainview) have joined the SharableThings Inc. team.

James Topham was the KPMG Vancouver technology partner and now serves on the board of directors of high tech companies.

Zak Greant has worked at MySQL (employee #37), Mozilla, The Open Source Foundation, and Sxip. He is a cofounder of LexPublica, which occupies much of his time.

As co-founder of Virtual Vineyards, Inc., Harry Max designed the interaction concepts behind the first secure Internet shopping cart. He was Web Communications Architect at Dreamworks Animation and has written a book about Skype. He has worked for Silicon Graphics, Apple, HP, and other well-known companies. His working life in Silicon Valley is outlined at http://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymax.

None of the new team members leaves his day job, and exactly what it means to be on the SharableThings team is still under discussion, but SharableThings is delighted to be assembling this terrific pool of talent.

We are on the lookout for a marketing wizard. (If you are a wizard and happen to read this blog, please send your resume to support@sharablethings.com.)

SharableThings has entered the New Ventures BC 2010 competition.

Competition details can be seen at www.newventuresbc.com/the-competition.

New Ventures BC says its competition is one of North America's largest technology business-idea competitions and compares the competition to a "boot-camp" for business startups.

We are looking forward (we think) to having www.sharablethings.com judged by business experts.

If SharableThings can reach round 3, we will get advice from mentors.

If we can hang in until round 4, angel investors, venture capitalists, and industry experts will evaluate our business plan.

There are prizes!

The Olympic games have brought interesting people to Vancouver. The Olympic organizers have closed streets and stopped street parking in many areas. A result is that Vancouverites are taking public transit and meeting people they would never otherwise meet. That's how I happened to meet Victoria, an Olympic volunteer from Fort St. John, on the #9 Broadway bus yesterday.

Victoria volunteers at the figure-skating and speed-skating Olympic venue. Sometimes she gets to see the events while volunteering; sometimes not. In the spirit of the previous blog post, about sharing Eric, Victoria is sharing Victoria.

In everyday life, Victoria is a farmer. She and her husband raise sheep. Ordinarily, next month, lambing would begin, but she has turned their farm into what she called, without blinking an eye, an "ass retirement centre". This is not as rude as it sounds to city ears. Now she and her husband look after retired and abandoned donkeys.

Running a retirement centre for donkeys came about naturally for Victoria. For years she had a donkey instead of a dog guarding her ewes (or, as she calls them, "my ladies"). Victoria found a donkey the best shepherd. He protected her sheep against coyotes and wolves. With pride, she told the story of a donkey that killed a cougar.

Victoria's relationship with her shepherd was not always smooth. When a lightening storm approached, Victoria chased all her ladies towards the barn, only to find that her donkey had gone inside too, leaving her alone, the tallest thing in the field. (For this transgression, the donkey spent time in solitary confinement.)

I am taking the bus again this morning. I hope there will be another Victoria aboard, willing to share her story.

Eric Brooke has posted an interesting sharing interest on www.sharablethings.com. He has posted himself: see http://www.sharablethings.com/interests/47 in which he offers to share "Eric".

Some time ago, Eric said that sharing education would be particularly useful. His "Eric" sharing interest may be offering himself as a public speaker, as an employee, as a consultant or coach. Eric hasn't defined the roles yet.

Ontario dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has won a 16-year legal battle to share raw milk products. A key to his success was his cow-sharing arrangement with customers. (Search “cow sharing” at http://www.nationalpost.com/. You will find information about Mr. Schmidt's farm at http://www.glencoltonfarms.com/).

The Ontario decision is part of an interesting debate about individual rights, supply management, and food safety.

The larger picture involves the community supported agriculture movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture.

Will someone post farm-animal sharing agreements at our sharing agreements (precedents and links) wiki pages?

In the world of SharableThings, strangers are all those people, just outside family and friends and acquaintances, with whom sharing might be possible.

Most people will probably look first to share with friends and family, but strangers sometimes make good sharing partners.

You may need an additional sharing party to round out your group – say, three families who are already friends need a fourth family to buy an organic farm.

A couple whose friends don’t play bridge are looking for bridge games.

And destination resort condominiums are often shared by co-owners who don’t know each other and never meet, because their co-ownership and condo use is governed by agreements and professional management.

The do-it-yourself sharing at the heart of SharableThings will often be among friends, but I hope there is a role for those friends-in-waiting who are meanwhile called strangers.

Our most important knowledge, according to Popper (1972)...is shared knowledge.

David Miller, "Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction", http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/associates/miller/wroclaw2a.pdf

When a pickpocket got my credit cards, it set me thinking about the difference between theft and sharing.

The thief got my credit cards; I got nothing.

In no time, the thief was “sharing” expensive electronics goods. The stores got paid nothing.

My pocket was picked without my consent. The thief took electronics goods from the stores without their real consent.

It seems that theft is unilateral, an exercise of power by one person over another; and sharing is bilateral, the result of mutual consent.

Perhaps successful sharing depends on the sharing group members looking consistently for each other's consent.

Perhaps establishing a successful sharing group depends on finding people willing to look consistently for each other's consent?

"Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business. And yet by reason of goodness, and in respect of use, 'Friends,' as the proverb says, 'will have all things common.' Even now there are traces of such a principle, showing that it is not impracticable, but, in well-ordered states, exists already to a certain extent and may be carried further. For, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use with them."

From Aristotle's Politics, Book II, Part V

Despite trying to hold SharableThings very closely, there are a few unknown email accounts and users showing up at www.sharablethings.com.

There are also a few early signs that network effects will occur.

Physical sharables predominate still: warm weather get-aways particularly as this Autumn turns wet and cold in Vancouver and people think of the sun.

One of the most interesting recent sharing ideas - not yet up on the site as a Sharing Interest unfortunately - is education. One of SharableThings' interviewees said he would be willing to share his education, something he is already doing by speaking and helping non-profit organizations. He also mentioned mentoring.

A bunch of high school buddies got together last night. We talked about sharing.

One of us had a lot of experience with sharing. He shares a vacation home on the sea. He has congenial fellow owners, except one.

His sharing group have a partnership agreement, but the partnership agreement has no shotgun clause. (A shotgun clause enables partners to put each other to an election: be bought out or buy out.)

For sharing groups who have substantial assets (i.e., anything group members would not want to walk away from without compensation) having in place a sharing agreement with a shotgun clause makes sense. Without such an agreement, it can be expensive and difficult to solve the problem of an incompatible partner.

Vince (CTO of SharableThings.com) suggested a blog posting about http://www.100Kgarages.com.

The 100Kgarages website landing page starts out: "During the 2007 US Presidential debates, Tom Brokaw asked candidates Obama and McCain whether our challenges would be best solved by ... "funding a Manhattan-style project or by supporting 100,000 garages across America to encourage the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?"

The website puts people with designs that need fabricating in touch with the "garages" that can fabricate them.

Are websites like 100Kgarages themselves Brokaw's "garages"? They are springing up everywhere in our new backyard, the World Wide Web, to help people get new things done.

East along the lane from the Golden Valley fruit and vegetable store is the Kitsilano public library.

Yvonne runs the Golden Valley fruit and vegetable store. She works endless hours. Her prices aren't the lowest. You go there because her fruit and vegetables are fresh, and she is cheerful.

Another Yvonne was the heroine of Malcolm Lowry's great novel, Under the Volcano.

I mentioned this last Sunday to Yvonne, then felt badly immediately.

"I don't have time to read books," she said.

It’s said that the generation that grew up on Ernest Hemingway wanted to fight bulls and fascism in Spain. Those in my generation who read Under the Volcano wanted to die tragically in Mexico or be loved by a Yvonne.

Supposedly in Malcolm Lowry's books, east is the direction of reason.

Leaving Yvonne’s, it was east along the lane, to make amends for the faux pas at a neglected sanctuary, the public library.

There, there was an epiphany. In these years of thinking about sharing, why hadn’t the connection between a public library and sharing been obvious?

Now that the "things_that_can_be_shared" wiki page has been amended, you will find new entries there for "book" and "library".

And if you have a private library, try listing it as a Sharing Interest, for sharing with your neighbours.

Perhaps one of them will be a Yvonne.

We saw "Julie and Julia" last week. Can I admit that I felt for Julie when no-one was commenting on her blog posts?

Bob's Case is at http://www.sharablethings.com/interests/35.

A sharing self-assessment helps Bob turn up things to share. In this first month, Bob decides to share a Porsche and rent out half his townhouse. He will come out $500 a month ahead. But what about the house, wife, kids, and minivan lurking on the edge of his consciousness?

Watch for the next installment of Bob's Case.

We spent the afternoon making promotional T-shirts. Vince made three for Sourdough Labs, and I made three for SharableThings. We each made a cross-promotional shirt. Vince’s said that Sourdough Labs got three startups going this year: Chipped.In, PennyMinder, and SharableThings. Mine said Sourdough Labs #GSD (which apparently means “gets stuff done” in the bawdlerized version).

The Staples T-Shirt transfers worked pretty well. If you looked closely, there was yellowing around the letters, but who looks closely at a T-shirt? The T-shirts were from Costco. 100% cotton. XL.

Neither of us had experience as walking billboards, except, like most people, unconsciously for clothing brands. We went to Launch Party, a somewhat regular Vancouver event for newly launched companies. Walking around wearing the names of our own startups made us feel self-conscious. Starting conversations was easy, however.