Sharing is an easy way to improve one’s feelings of well-being without needing a lot of money. However, most people have resistance to sharing due to basic trust issues.  Will the person return my item? Will they take care of it? Enter this very practical book from NOLO press in Berkeley to help facilitate sharing and live a better life by pooling community resources.

Source: Amazon

And as the yellow sun faded from the sky, someone would get the extension cords, others would bring out the chairs from their homes as a couple men would bring out a television and fifteen or twenty people would sit outside in the evening’s heat and watch. These people were poor. Sharing was a way of life for them. And you know, they seemed happy.

In the Sharing Solution, you’ll learn that sharing is work. There is a certain amount of trust required and sometimes agreements need to be drawn up. But you will save money, however even if saving money isn’t your goal, you’ll make friends and we can never have enough of those.

There are four hundred or so pages on sharing in The Sharing Solution and they cover just about every aspect of just about anything you’d care to share, from ride sharing etiquette to running a co-op. The book is full of practical advice and though not everything here will apply to everyone, I think there is plenty here that anyone can use. If you want to save some money, make some friends and go a little green, give this book a look. You won’t be disappointed.

You can be pleasantly surprised how much knowledge and expertise lives in your neighborhood.

Source: COCo

NDG Skill Share Gathering – Saturday February 26th, from 12 – 4pm at the NDG Food Depot, 2121 Oxford Ave (corner de Maisonneuve)

Éco-quartier NDG and the NDG Food Depot are teaming up to offer a sharing of practical skills to live more happy, creative, and sustainable lives. Learning is plentiful, everywhere, and need not come with price tags or expert degrees. We are all teachers. We are all students. We want to live with enthusiasm, so let us learn with vigor! Coming together as a community, we discover there is a wealth of knowledge and talent waiting to be shared.

The theme for this skill share is ‘Lets Do It Ourselves’ – as a community creating a sustainable environment, learning to reduce our expenses, and having fun together! Come one, come all, the curious, the enthusiasts, the students and the teachers!

Some examples of workshops being offered: fun with wild fermentation, sprouting, vermicomposting, make your own herbal salve, learn a natural beauty care from your grocery bag and much much more! Please register at ecoquartier@gmail.com or call 514 486-2727.

The hand-writing is on the wall: sharing is a growing trend that will only accelerate with further economic contractions, resource scarcity and climate change.

We will have to figure out a new way to co-exist and this is the answer. Meet the economic revolution…

According to the survey below of 500 respondents, 60% made the connection between sharing and sustainability, citing “better for the environment” as one benefit of sharing.

The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where “access” trumps “purchases”, and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrows, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences.

Sources:  Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine

A discussion about free online music with the band Prussia who just released a free online album.

Via: Deep Cutz

“I think about a time when entertainment, storytelling, and music was shared freely, often ceremonial, with the whole community benefiting from the shared experience. Our reality is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace. I think that as some of us begin to move into a free society we project some of those attributes in our actions. I think it’s safe to say that other artists who share their work freely have similar intentions. We aren’t interested in a 20th century capitalist model. I think that the music business, as with most of what we think of as “business”, (i.e. corporate/sweatshop models) is naturally going to struggle as people in the society demand accountability and the right to live with the principals of mutual aid. Sure, there’s no short term profit, which is why the business isn’t giving anything away, but healthy communities that freely share information and resources are the only way we can have sustainable “profits”.

If there’s a line that is being crossed here, its the line separating old and new, slavery and freedom, extinction model vs. evolution model. That’s what is happening with wikipedia, online social networks, urban gardening, free art, and the reemergence of psychedelics. We are creating the world that we’d rather live in. Whether or not we can hold it together long enough to get to the promised land depends on how quickly we decide to move away from old belief systems and into a more holistic consciousness.”

Toronto is looking into bringing Montreal’s Bike sharing service into town. Bixi officially launches in Montreal in the Spring of 2009 and promises to offer 2,400 bikes to share at 300 different stations located throughout Montreal.

Around 10am Oct. 24, a large flatbed truck pulled up to the southeast corner of Bloor and Spadina. As it unloaded seven sleek black-and-silver bikes, matching modular locking racks and a solar-power automated kiosk onto the street, a trio of workers dressed in matching red rain-jackets began demonstrating Montreal’s popular bike sharing system to onlookers. Bixi — a combination of bicycle and taxi — had peddled its way into town to show off its fancy new hardware to an envious cycling community.

“[This demonstration] is to give Torontonians a chance to see what a made in Canada bike share program looks like,” says Yvonne Bambrick, spokesperson for the Toronto Cyclists Union, who along with the Community Bicycle Network and Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation co-sponsored the event. “It’s pretty wild that it’s not just in Paris.”

Via Eye Weekly