$251 billion, between 1982 and 2002, reflecting a continuing trend in their expanding engagement with their publics. Meanwhile, 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 individuals. The National Center for Charitable Statistics further reports that the number of nonprofits increased 31.5 percent between 1999 and 2009, to 1.58 million. Data from Volunteering in America shows that in 2010, 63.4 million volunteers 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, facilitates around $5 million in no-interest 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
platform 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 symbiotic 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 websites, 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 reproduce. Visit the Infoworld Open Source Hall of Fame website for more on desktop favorites. Today, millions of individuals
and organizations rely on FOSS in performing their daily work, as do a growing number of governments. It’s a pervasive part of life in the developed
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world; because of its low cost, open source software may become even more important to developing countries.
The Open Way Inspired by the success of free and open source software, the values and practices of open sourcing— making information and innovations publicly available—are being applied in a dizzying number of ways. In the past few years, open, or peer-to- peer, sharing strategies have gained significant traction in science, business, culture, education and government. Applications range from the
obscure, like the Open Source Tractor, to the everyday, like the OpenStreetMaps project. It’s a tough trend to quantify, because it is so viral and self-organized. The Obama administration’s Open
Government Directive is currently one of the most visible of these efforts, at least in the United States. The directive orders each executive department and agency to identify and publish online, in an open format, at least three high-value data sets; create an open government web page and respond to public input received via that page; and develop and publish an Open Government Plan that describes how they are improving transparency and integrating public participation and collaboration into its activities.
Social Media Sharing is the currency of social media. Socialnomics author Erik Qualman alerts us that, “Social media is bigger than you think.” The public uploaded more
user-generated video to YouTube in a recent six-month period than the three major TV networks produced and distributed in the past 60 years. Now with more than 500 million users, Facebook would represent the third largest country in the world by population. Wikipedia contains more than 9 million articles in 250 languages, all written by volunteers— and with an accuracy that studies like that at Harford Community
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