That's me and my OpenROV co-founder Eric Stackpole working on a prototype underwater robot.
Don't get me wrong, I like collaborative consumption. I think Airbnb makes the world a more interesting place, allowing people have more authentic travel experiences. I love TaskRabbit. I use it all the time for errands. I've written about tool libraries for MAKE Magazine. I get it. Access is certainly more appealing that ownership. For my lifestyle, at least.
But I still think collaborative consumption is overrated compared to the other side of the sharing economy coin: collaborative creation. The true potential of a networked, peer-to-peer economy is just starting to show with the maker movement. And it's not just about what we can consume together, it's about what we can create together.
Sure, collaborative consumption can help you earn some side money, subsidize car ownership, or have a more human-centered vacation, but rarely can it help you learn new skills, build a small business, or drive a new industry. Collaborative creation is about building new forms of wealth, not just sharing it. Collaborative consumption isn’t designed to create high-skilled, meaningful livelihoods for users. From personal experience, I believe that the skill-building, job-creating potential of the maker movement is more important than a new way to consume. It can address one of society’s biggest problems -- high unemployment, especially among young adults like myself.
As Chris Anderson eloquently described in his new book, Makers, the Internet is the prototype, the model for how to create with wide participation. And now we're seeing the same surge of creativity with stuff, and it's changing the way we experience the objects in our lives. From 3D printing to makerspace communities, Etsy to Kickstarter, the maker infrastructure is maturing to a stage where literally anyone can make significant contributions.
I've had a front row seat to this emerging trend. I've been writing the Zero to Maker column for MAKE, chronicling my journey from total beginner to improving amateur. After losing my job in 2011, I felt I didn't have much of a choice. I knew I wanted to get out from behind the computer, but I also had zero technical experience. Luckily, I found the maker community to be friendly and empowering.
I started an open-source underwater robot project with my friend (and hero) Eric Stackpole. In the last year, OpenROV has grown from a conversation between me and Eric into an award winning open-source project as well as a fledgeling business. We're not making much money, but we're fine with that. We've found something much more valuable: a global community of collaborators who are working hand-in-hand to democratize ocean exploration. The experience is rich in community as well as what Eric and I refer to as "Return on Adventure."
My Zero to Maker experience at TechShop has been a shining example of the true potential of the sharing economy - both collaborative creation and consumption. The tool-access afforded by the makerspace was critical in my development, because without the shared-resource model my plight would’ve been impossible. But the real value - the meat on the bones - was the way members and staff supported our project. OpenROV simply wouldn't exist without the communities that have supported us: TechShop, Kickstarter, and the larger maker community.
It’s the process of creation that instills meaning into the products we use. Consuming together can’t inject meaning in the products around us. Moving away from a culture of rampant over-consumption will take much more than changing our eating, driving, and buying habits. It’s going to take a whole suite of new values, technologies, and experiences. The maker movement is an opportunity to build that re-imagined future.
Perhaps the most encouraging news is that it's more accessible than ever to get involved. It seems that every maker I meet had a similarly warm welcome. Each feel a duty to pay it forward, which builds a culture of inclusion and possibility. The tools that seemed so intimidating when I got started, like 3D printers and CNC machines, each came with someone, either local or online, who did a great job teaching. Even something as crazy as an open-source underwater robot project was able to find a supportive home.
The experience has opened my eyes to the potential of collaborative creation. Lucky for you, anyone fluent in collaborative consumption already has many of the skills needed to thrive in the maker world. After all, they’re just two sides of the same movement.
##
David Lang is the co-founder of OpenROV as well as the author of the book-in-progress, Zero to Maker.
Comments
Seth Schneider wrote on 01.31.13, 6:24pm:
Thanks for sharing your story, David. I find it really inspiring, and am glad that you're documenting how other people can follow your path in Zero to Maker.
Shane wrote on 02.02.13, 12:42pm:
Brilliant!!! Thanks, you've given me a real 'penny dropped' moment. I spend every working waking hour trying to understand and support the emergence of the new economy and there was something about the collaborative economy that i hadn't been able to articulate but not anymore :)
Shane http//:www.reconomy.org
Shane wrote on 02.02.13, 2:52pm:
Here's how the article helped me... I already believe that it is all about collaborative creation but couldn't articulate my thinking on this properly.
When i hear about the internet enabled collaborative economy w]i often hear of three overlapping and interlinking movements;
- Open source
- Collaborative consumption
- Peer to peer
Open source and collaborative consumption are often discussed separately by proponents from each of those movements. As such they're seen in separate silos and I find it really difficult to give a clear and simple explanation of how these two movements fit as a single unified collaborative movement other than saying that they're both intensely collaborative movements and that they both use peer to peer technologies.
Here's how the article has helped me. My key mental evolution is that i now see open source as just one very important form of collaborative creation. This has given me a much clearer mental link between open source and collaborative consumption because now i have the phraseology to describe them as two sides of the same collaborative coin.
Of course we don't just create and consume, there is a whole spectrum of collaborative doing, collaborative living, collaborative production and mix of all of the above when seen through the "prosumer" mind set.
With regard to peer to peer, I've always found it easy enough to fit p2p into this line of thinking because it describes a whole spectrum too. Some like to call the new economy the peer to peer economy, others like to call it the sharing economy and i like to call it the collaborative economy but i see this as just different ways of describing the same thing. So no problem there.
It is indeed the facets of collaborative creation and collaborative production that have the most potential to be disruptive and to make large swathes of the old industrialised economy obsolete. But the internet enabled collaborative movements alone do not make up the collaborative economy. The magic recipe is to mix the disruption of the collaborative movement, with the experience and scale of the cooperative movement, together with a healthy dose of the solutions and ethics of the change-maker movement (e.g. Transition, Occupy, Slow food etc).
Ronald Van Den Hoff wrote on 02.03.13, 2:56am:
Nice story David, we prefer to call collaborative CONsumption rather collaborative PROsumption, as the consumer doesn't only consume, but also is involved in the all stages of the production process as well.
Brill wrote on 02.04.13, 7:40am:
Incidentally, you might want to read Makers by Cory Doctorow.
http://www.amazon.ca/Makers-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765312816
It's really a young adult fiction, but some of the ideas overlap.
As a comment on your particle, I think sharable consumption is simply part of sharable creation or maybe the catalyst for it.
We do anything we do for a reason, even if the reason is simply that we enjoy it. Sharable consumption seems to me to be almost like getting the reward first and I think it may actually be diving awareness, and a desire to participate in, sharable creation.
They are not mutually dependent, but they are part of the same philosophy and therefore drivers for one another.
Seth Schneider wrote on 02.04.13, 11:35am:
@Matthew: "Producers own their wealth. We should strive all to become producers first, consumers second." Well said. In addition to changing the balance of power, I believe that becoming a producer can feel empowering. When we are able to do things for ourselves we break the dependency that many of us in industrialized nations have on the incomprehensible and huge production and distribution systems.
@Shane: Thank you for sharing what you learned. I share your challenge of being able to articulate all of these separate but interrelated movements. And I like what you're saying about mixing together the best of the collaborative and cooperative movements with other change-making movements. I think we're doing that on Shareable by always trying to find and report on the cutting edge of these "remixes" and advancements that are emerging.
@Ronald: Collaborative PROsumption mostly works for me, although it feels a bit awkward to say out loud. I don't like the shorter term "prosumer" as much because to me it sounds like PROfessional + conSUMER. :-)
@Brill Thanks for the recommendation of Cory Doctorow's _Makers_. I've requested it from my local library!
Kit Robinson wrote on 02.05.13, 9:22am:
"Stop! ur both right"??
Good article, but no need dis CollComs to get ur point across?? 2 sides of same alt coin; better together. If we're sharing on both the make and take sides, then it really will be a new economy. :)
Eco lili wrote on 02.06.13, 1:04am:
I beg to differ, if what you are measuring is personal development of each and every one of us and the vast opportunities of collaborative creation, you are probably right. But ones you change your perspective to global sustainability fighting the waste we as a civilization produce and the over exploitation of natural resources required to make the staff we waste so quickly , than the makers movement which i love dearly has 0 positive or negative contribution , whereas CC contributes both in terms of creating new infrastructures which diminish the amount of staff we need as well as changes our behavior and state of mind from a take use waste, only cost matters to a more sustainable perspective
Pritha RaySircar wrote on 02.06.13, 12:34pm:
David,
thank you for sharing your experience and asking questions, of yourself and us.
I think it's important to note, as you and others demonstrate, that #collcons represents a spectrum of participant productions (HT, Jeff Skoll!) that span everything from synchronized, successive and/or simultaneous consumption on the one end, to resource generation/creation on the other (think sharing more than one's share - or what I've been calling 'generative consumption' when I think out loud, to myself, but softly enough so as not to really freak anyone out).
It's this end of the spectrum that could be rather interesting because resource generation, as a result of 'consumption', takes us beyond anything the post-industrial modern marketplace has been able to execute. Most exciting to me, and uncomfortable-making for the powers that be, is that such a result is not easy to 'price' - meaning it's hard to assign a monetary value to creating a job or building self-esteem, or feeding entrepreneurship, creativity, etc. I think it might be safe to say that collaborative consumption that results in resource generation exists outside of paper currency; and that's both radical and needed.
Finally, I really like what you point to re: job creation, as a result of 'making'. It's my hope that policymakers, at least on the municipal level, get curious/excited/scared enough to start to pay attention.
Pritha
David Lang wrote on 02.06.13, 5:24pm:
I like the spectrum perspective! Like, types of consumption.
I guess I've drawn the distinction between creation and consumption as creating something new vs. using a different resource. But that's too simplistic. You're right in that consumption is a part of everything - even in making robots we're consuming plastic, shop time, metals. So generative consumption can be something that leaves more on the table, from a economical, environmental or social perspective.
Like Tim O'Reilly always says, "Create more value than you capture."
Maybe it's that simple.
Eco lili wrote on 02.07.13, 1:29am:
i like very much the - "Create more value than you capture." it reminds me the dynamic equilibrium perspective of all physiological processes
Shane wrote on 02.07.13, 2:13am:
@Seth
you said " I think we're doing that on Shareable by always trying to find and report on the cutting edge of these "remixes" and advancements that are emerging"
totally agreed - you guys are one of my favourite resources for learning about this wacky new world that's excitingly emerging :)
Rich Radka wrote on 02.08.13, 3:32am:
Agreed. In fact unless your a complete survivalist/isolationist, making is useless without consuming. I'm not talking about the traditional consumer-driven economy, I'm talking about the new distributed co-location of creating and using, of problem and solution that everyone can take part in. Life is about exchange; we give and we take. That is supply and demand, making and consuming. We are neither just consumers; nor just makers (unless you plan to eat nothing but robots :)). Its about networked value exchange - the ability to find somone who wants not just what you want, but what you know, what you can do, and who you know. And we can find increasingly more relevant things we want from the crowd. Don't be afraid of being a consumer; just don't be defined by that. You now have greater choice of what you consume, from whom you get it, and what you what to exchange for it - money, goods, services, knowledge or connections.
Rich Radka
claropartners.com
AMEN
Collaborative consumption is the corporate money-making notion of 'sharing'. It does nothing to change the balance of power between large, wealthy, powerful, producer-corporations, and the myriad separated slave-consumers.
Producers own their wealth. We should strive all to become producers first, consumers second.