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Open Organisations – &Share Part 1

This post is the first of a new series, following the progress of &Share in their first year. &Share is an online start-up which is looking to move us towards a circular economy by facilitating the sharing of resources. 

Alex Whitcroft is a multi-disciplinary designer focused on holistic sustainability, in particular community building and closed loop design.

He is the founder of &Share, a resource sharing web platform for enterprises, as well as being a certified Passivhaus Designer and running the small cooperative architectural studio AWB, working on affordable, closed-loop housing.

As he describes it “sustainability must have just been in my bones. I’ve always practised and believed in it – long before I’d been told it was this thing call “sustainability”. It just was just the obvious approach.”

mail@alexwhitcroft.co.uk | @alexwhitcroft

In 2009 I climbed out of a dusty white pickup truck in rural Missouri into the heat of a Mid West summer.  I didn’t know it then, but it was the start of a life-changing 4 year chapter in my life.  I had recently graduated from a BSc in architecture in Cardiff and had arrived at D.R. Ecovillage to spend 3 months building a strawbale house.  I stayed 2 years and ended up lead designed for an 8,500sqft eco community centre and learning a huge amount, first hand, about collaboration, community, consensus, pioneering spirit, and what 42°C and 98% relative humidity feels like.

Image credit: Alex Whitcroft

But what has that got to do with the price of beans?  Fair question.  Well, if I had to pick a moment when my journey into the collaborative economy began in earnest, that was it.  And over my time there, and since, I’ve become increasingly involved and interested in the collaborative economy, culminating recently in leaping, from a background in architecture, into a new industry (the tech startups scheme) and founding &Share – but we’ll get to that.

First I need to clarify something (hopefully without sounding too much like I’m ranting).  When I say ‘collaborative’ or ‘sharing’ economy I mean that: I mean ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing’.  What I don’t mean is ‘micro-entrepreneurship’ or ‘online rental’.  It’s a distinction that a lot of the big players in “sharing” right now would like us to overlook, but one that has started to get some much needed coverage and discussion.

Drawing credit: Susie Cagle

We can’t just start micro renting our stuff to each other and freelancing more and believe that we’ve made some kind of magnificent leap of social progress.  Because we won’t have.  We have to go further to create real change.  We have to ask harder questions.

What will it really take to solve the environmental and social challenges of our age?  What does an equitable world with 8 billion people look like? What does a company or private ownership look like in a world like that?

Graph credit: Alex Whitcroft | Data source: Worldometers.info

And it’s hard.  I get that.  It’s hard because it’s so alien to most of us – collaborating and sharing I mean.  Most of our society is set up around competition.

As I see it ‘proprietaryism’ is a big part of the challenge.  We own resources privately, use them privately, store knowledge privately, keep profits privately.  Yet, at the same time we all sort of know that cross pollination, collaboration, and chance encounters are the stuff that fuels innovation.

Image credit: &Share

So how can we get organisations to share and collaborate more?  Are we even talking about institutions as we know them, just more open, or are we talking about something fundamentally different?

Most people are familiar with open source software, and we are now just starting to see the emergence of open source hardware.  We can’t be sure what the future holds, but one things is inevitable: change.

Cartoon credit: Mark Anderson | Caption by: Alex Whitcroft

And that brings us to &Share and the Open Networks initiative.

Image credit: &Share

Put really simply, &Share is a web platform to allow organisations and networks to share resources with each other – spaces, equipment, vehicles, materials, skills, data.  Just like so many other platforms I hear you say.  Well… except it is built around collaboration, co-ownership, resource management, social capital, and will eventually employ decentralised data.  In fact it probably has as much in common with ERP software as with collaborative economy marketplaces.  It’s about leveraging technology to let us create a ‘cloud commons’ and providing the support organisations need to engage.

Image credit: &Share

Since we launched publicly at the Resource trade show in March this year we’ve been working hard on building partnerships, talking to potential users, designing the platform, working out the most open and sustainable business model – it’s been busy! – and next week we will be launching our first pilot.

Image credit: &Share

That first pilot is going to be with a selection of networks including charities, universities, maker and co-working spaces, a variety SME, and theatres.  A wonderfully diverse initial ecosystem.

We’re just starting out but so far everything points to it being quite an adventure.

We’ll be writing a series of these posts, every few months, so you can follow us on our journey (you can also cheat and sign up for our mailing list if three month intervals is just too long for you!).  In the meantime:

• Are open organisations an important part of finding solutions to the challenges we face as a society and a species?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.
• More of a “less talk more do” kind of person (I understand, so am I)?  If you want to get involved with &Share or Open Networks get in touch.