SpaceShare Carpooling & Green Logistics December Newsletter
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This month...
- Year in Review
- Santa's Carbon-Neutral Sleigh
- Live in the Philippines or Thailand, Work for SpaceShare
- Enviro Tip: Junk Mail
- Volunteer Project: Green Events Guide
- An honest New Year's Review
Year in Review
It's been an amazing year, and also a tough year.
Some of the best news has come from events like EarthDance, where
nearly 700 people signed up to carpool for a single event. We've seen
incremental improvements across the board: some code improvements, a few
web site changes, better systems for working with client events, more contacts,
more press (like KPFA radio two weeks ago), more events and more users at
each event.
This year
is ending well, with repeat client events starting to line up carpool systems
six months ahead of time instead of six weeks last year.
There's more good news on the horizon, with new tools for 2006. New
designed systems let
venues like Four Quarters InterFaith Sanctuary
orchestrate carpools for a dozen or
so events, all on one configuration. And our activist connection tools
should see their first serious use, helping large gatherings refocus and
relocalize their energies back into communities.
We're also facing some bottle-necks and challenges to continuing the
project. I'll put the challenges at the bottom since, well, no one
wants to read that, but if you are interested in the struggles that
"walk the walk" ventures face, see the last article.
Santa's Carbon-Neutral Sleigh
Some of my favorite activists are big supporters of Buy Nothing
Day and general efforts to minimize the over-consumption of this
season. One gift that let's you buy less than nothing is
TerraPass:
you counter-balance the carbon dioxide your car (or someone else's)
produces by funding a project to reduce greenhouse gasses somewhere
else.
Live in the Philippines or Thailand, Work for SpaceShare
Activism aside, my dream job had long been to find a professional,
challenging
& worthwhile job, convince them to let me
telecommute,
then work from a tropical beach. SpaceShare is ready to grow beyond
just a staff of one. We have enough work to do
that we have to hire, especially people to research and call the
events that we want to help green.
Marketing SpaceShare might be a great telecommute from home
job for someone in transition, like a
new parent who wants to stay with their child, where you need to stay
part of the professional world, keep your resume active, save the
planet, work flexibly and from home, and for all that can manage
on a small paycheck.
Or, it might be a great job for an escape artist. Would you want to live
on a tropical beach for a year, work a 30 hour week in a professional setting
doing good work that will grow your resume,
and have a little bit of savings when your travels are over?
Past volunteers are particularly welcome to check in and let me
know if you are interested (I keep telling everyone that volunteers will
get oversized karmic paybacks...) As are people with any real knowledge or
advice about how we could go about "travel-sourcing" some of SpaceShare's
phone and online work.
Enviro Tip: Stop Junk Mail
Stop paper junk mail:
www.stopjunkmail.org (as recommended by Alameda County Green Business Program.)
A quick guide to the more complicated world of junk email:
http://www.learningfountain.com/spamadrs.htm
One interesting experiment is to google your email address. Spammers
use tools similar to the google search engine, so if google can find your
address, so can spammers. It's a good idea to have a throw-away
address to use when posting on the web.
Volunteer Project: Green Events Guide
SpaceShare may be talking to a thousand event organizers in a year.
It's time to help them be green in many ways. This is a straightforward
volunteer role that will help many events, researching and re-designing
the "Green Events Guide."
I'm hoping to get 2 or 3 people willing to make
a 5 hour per week committment for a couple months. Together, you'll be
able to make a real contribution - anyone looking for a green New
Year's Resolution?
An honest New Year's Review
My personal philosophy to creating community and finding joy in
paticipating in efforts to heal the earth isn't to get a charismatic
leader up on stage to lead and to encourage people to be conscious,
nor to think small and leave the main economy to corporations,
but simply to find the place you can have the most effect and get to work.
Work with clients outside the environmental movement really has been
going amazing well. When I first started SpaceShare, I thought this
would be the most challenging part, taking a seed of an idea and seeing if it
could sprout. I never intended to do this alone, always wanted other
people to jump in with me. I expected that once the ideas were proven,
showing that a few people could create tremendous environmental change,
there would be support and the environmental community would get behind
it. That hasn't begun to happen.
New Business Models & Living Wage Activism
As I've said for a year or two now, SpaceShare must be a three
person company to survive.
SpaceShare is a relatively low-budget operation that isn't going
to attract investment capital, but if there were three or more of us,
we'd all be able to make a decent living.
I've been asking everyone I know to connect me with potential
partners to take on some of the risk and excitement, helping me reach
out to the thousands of events across the country. I've invited my friends,
I've tried to invite all the anarchists in Berkeley
to come make this a collective, but no one has made the jump.
Community
Lots of people on this list have contributed in small and moderate ways,
and I truly appreciate it. Finding people to come join me in the center,
even just so we'll able to process all the advice and suggestions generated
here, finding people who take on parts of the project so I can get them
off my plate has been much harder.
SpaceShare
was intended to follow a different model, instead of asking donors for
money, it was intended as more of a "do it ourselves" model.
In a sad experience for me, very few of the
interns or volunteers who commit to a project show up,
and the energy of always asking has worn me thin. I know that there have
been people who really meant to volunteer that I failed to communicate
with under the waves of offers by people who don't show up.
Another slow point for community building has been many of the largest
Bay Area environmental organizations, who have collectively
been some of the slowest groups to participate & contribute back,
few ever remember to call SpaceShare when they have an event,
and I don't have the resources to keep reminding them. Our national
growth is going well, but local is slow.
SpaceShare can't be just me anymore, and the sad truth is,
I've failed to bring in many other people besides friends, and volunteers have
collectively used more of my time than they've contributed.
I don't need to make much
money, I don't mind working hard,
but I can't do this alone, and have reached a personal limit
energetically, where contributing to the world is no longer
a joy.
There have been a few wonderful exceptions to this who have helped keep
SpaceShare going, but not enough for a project of this size - the point
isn't to show that it can be done, but to do it, to help thousands
of events and colleges and churches, millions of people.
Future choices
This New Years I'll be giving some serious thought to the future of
SpaceShare. The short version is a switch to more of a client-focus
and standard business model, less a long-term focus on building a nationwide
instant-carpool system. Below are the likely
path-changes I'll be exploring for 2006.
Direction change options:
- Reducing non-exchange activism:
SpaceShare has been building many free sites, from peace rallies
to vegetarian events. It's long been the "policy" that these events
are chosen by the volunteers - if you volunteer twenty hours, you
can credit that to decide that a particular peace rally should have a free
carpool system. I've been covering the slack and can't do it anymore,
so unless other people contribute and assign their contributions to
free sites, there won't be many built. Other "activist organization"
projects, like the Greening
Guide, will not be on my personal to-do list this year.
- SpaceShare may be going to convert to a more traditional business model.
focused a bit more on the bottom line, switching from trying to write
the next generation of carpool tools towards writing more commercial
software for events. Building a nation-wide instant-carpool system
is beyond my capacity without a couple more people.
- Another option
is becoming a more traditional nonprofit and looking for grant money;
I'm worried that if I spend my time doing this SpaceShare will fall
apart in the meanwhile, but am considering a foray in this direction.
- SpaceShare is facing many of the same challenges as other US businesses.
There are very few coops of any type in Berkeley, and now I have
a better idea why. What feels like the strangest option but
is looking quite likely: switching from a goal of forming a collective
or partnership towards outsourcing some of the work overseas.
- Another possibility is to move operations to somewhere where
the cost of living is more reasonable, where there are coops thriving.
One surprising pattern I've noticed is that on the road,
in places like Portland and Seattle, we've had great people
show up just off Craigslists posts. My data sample is small, but the people
we've worked with there have been much less flaky and actually show up.
SpaceShare might be moving to
Eugene or Portland: if you'd like to support a new home base for this project,
or work for SpaceShare where you live, let me know.
Options
If you feel ready to
contribute a piece of the puzzle that can keep us growing, let me know
soon, and help guide the new directions SpaceShare will be taking.
I don't mean to list the shortcomings of the enviro movement as a whine,
but rather as a call to action, to show what SpaceShare is facing and explore
ways to strengthen the movement.
I certainly hope that SpaceShare doesn't become another great
environmental idea that doesn't happen except at a token level.
My skills and energy won't let me run the whole show:
if more volunteers get serious, if a few people join as partners
in the center of SpaceShare, if an angel investor makes a somewhat
risky loan at low interest, we can continue to have the energy to grow
over the "hump" of being too small to be financially sustainable, we
can grow to where SpaceShare can contribute to the lives of the people
doing the work rather than be a burden on one person.
So you'll
either be hearing from me the smaller and safer goals for 2006
from the list above, or
with luck be reading a newsletter someone else writes with better news!
Blessings & Choices,
Stephen
SpaceShare.com
6420 Colby St.
Oakland, CA 94618
(510) 520-6175
Replacing Cars with Community
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