ports that nonprofit earned income grew by more than 200 percent, to $251 bil- lion, between 1982 and 2002, reflecting a continuing trend in their expanding engagement with their publics. Mean- while, Cleantech Group research shows that investment in clean-tech ventures nearly trebled, to $5.2 billion, between 2004 and 2008. At the same time, fair trade goods sales doubled between 2004 and 2007, to around $4 billion, according to the Fair Trade Federation. Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, says that more than 11,000 worker cooperatives have emerged in the last 30 years. Many embrace pro-social missions and are managed, governed and owned by the people who work at them.
The Nonprofit Sector Nonprofits are an increasingly important way for people to share their wealth and labor. Independent Sector reports that, in the U.S. alone, charitable donations to nonprofits more than doubled between 1987 and 2007, to $303 billion; about 75 percent came from private individu- als. The National Center for Charitable Statistics further reports that the number of nonprofits increased 31.5 percent between 1999 and 2009, to 1.58 mil- lion. Data from Volunteering in America shows that in 2010, 63.4 million vol- unteers dedicated more than 8.1 billion hours of service.
Microfinance
This form of capitalization is a powerful innovation that extends small loans and financial services to help the world’s poorest people rise out of poverty, serving customers that traditional banks largely ignore. Kiva, a U.S. nonprofit peer-to-peer microfinance sensation, fa- cilitates around $5 million in no-inter- est loans per month to entrepreneurs in developing nations through its website. Microfinancing is yet another way the world is learning to share its wealth.
The Internet
It’s easy to take it for granted, but the Internet’s potential as a sharing plat- form has just begun to unfold. The Internet itself would not be possible if people did not share labor, software
and infrastructure. No one owns it or runs it. It’s built and it operates on free and open source software and open standards. Data travels over networks and is routed through servers owned by private individuals and corporations that share transport and routing duties. This global commons enables the creation of tremendous value. Harvard Business School Professor John Quelch estimates that the economic impact of the Internet is $1.4 trillion annually in the United States alone. Last year, the Computer & Communications Industry Association calculated that companies and nonprofits relying on “fair use” (such as search engines, web hosting and social media) employ 17 million people and generate $4.7 trillion a year, one-sixth of the country’s gross domestic product.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
FOSS and the Internet have a symbi- otic relationship. The Internet would not have been possible without FOSS, and the growth of FOSS relies on the Internet to power its peer production and distribution model. For example, more than 270 million people use the Firefox browser, a shared, freely available tool. Half the world’s web- sites, about 112 million, are hosted on Apache’s open source server software. A quarter million websites run on Drupal, a leading open source content management system.
That’s just scratching the surface. Today, the more than 200,000 open source projects operate on nearly 5 billion lines of code that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to repro- duce. Visit the Infoworld Open Source Hall of Fame website for more on desk- top favorites.
Today, millions of individuals and organizations rely on FOSS in perform- ing their daily work, as do a growing number of governments. It’s a pervasive part of life in the developed world; because of its low cost, open source software may become even more im- portant to developing countries.
The Open Way Inspired by the success of free and natural awakenings July 2011 33
SHARING HELPFUL WEBSITES
The Internet is a vast repository of information, and even with the help of search engines, navigation can be daunting. These links address topics of interest noted in “Sharing Our World.”
Bike Sharing:
tinyurl.com/4zsfjtb Car Sharing:
tinyurl.com/49hytdj Co-working:
tinyurl.com/ygbvntq Ride Sharing:
tinyurl.com/499lh9n Sharing Directory:
Shareable.net/how-to-share
Source:
Shareable.net
Civic Engagement:
tinyurl.com/242yaja Cohousing:
tinyurl.com/3amn2ch Cooperatives:
tinyurl.com/4m7vqx2 Urban Agriculture:
tinyurl.com/la558s Yard Sharing:
tinyurl.com/4chmtua
Source:
Yes.Magazine.org
Business/Government/Education:
OpenSource.com Car Sharing:
RelayRides.com Home & Family Life:
NeighborGoods.net Home & Garden:
ShareSomeSugar.com
InfoWorld Open Source Hall of Fame:
tinyurl.com/4ujuzpu Microfinance:
Kiva.org Neighborhood Rentals:
Rentalic.com
Open Government Directive:
tinyurl.com/495ks6k Open Source Tractor:
OpenFarmTech.org/wiki/LifeTrac OpenStreetMaps:
OpenStreetMap.org Peer-to-Peer Knowledge:
blog.p2pFoundation.net Social Media:
TrendWatching.com Yard & Garden:
Hyperlocavore.ning.com
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