I just came across an interesting talk by the Sustainable Economies Law Center called The Legal Landscape of Social Enterprise and the Sharing Economy. It’s about the burgeoning movement known as the “Sharing Economy” and the legal issues around it. You might think it would be about as exciting as eating dust, but actually it was a great little talk – and not just because they’re pretty funny and they use lots of cute little stick drawings.
I have very mixed feelings about the idea of the Sharing Economy. The US has a long rich tradition of co-ops and other forms of sharing or collective ownership, especially in the world of agriculture. We’ve gone through plenty of cycles where co-ops begin to bloom, generating a lot of progressive excitement, only to fade in a few years. They usually get killed off by one of two problems. It’s very hard for them to get access to enough capital to survive. And once they become successful, they often get snuffed out by competitors. Some co-ops always survive, either by finding the right niche or by a hard to duplicate set of circumstances. But so far no one has figured out how to get them to scale to the point where they can become a serious force in the economy.
What’s interesting about the Center is that they are trying to chip away at the first problem. Part of their argument is that most communities have lots of capital that’s owned by folks who aren’t wealthy. If a cooperative café needs $30,000 to expand, it might not be able to get the money from a bank. But it might be able to raise it in smaller donations if there was a simple technological way to do so and a legal structure that encouraged it – or at least to make it so it wasn’t so impossibly complex that they didn’t need an SEC lawyer to pull it off. What they’re trying to tackle is the legal part.
I don’t know if this new movement will succeed where others have failed. Certainly some of the tools available are a lot better than what folks had in the past – social networking anyone? It’s definitely worth taking a closer look at.
For more info about the Center, which “facilitates the growth of sustainable, localized, and just economies, through legal research, professional training, resource development, and education,” check out their website.
