Published in #nett magazine in 2008

What do open source, shareware and Wikipedia have in common? They’re all part of the ‘gift economy’, the idea that you can do work for nothing and ‘gift’ it to others and somehow, you will be provided for. By Rosanne Bersten.

It’s a dream that goes beyond barter: you don’t hand someone your software in exchange for something of equal value; rather you simply hand someone your software or your hard work and sit back satisfied, knowing you have done good deeds and trusting that karma or the law of averages will mean your good deed is repaid, either by someday having a piece of software handed to you or more likely by looking up something in Wikipedia and benefiting from an entirely unrelated but equally gifted type of work.

Part of this idea was noted in the 2000 movie Pay It Forward but it’s been around a lot longer than that.

In 1986, a small group of people started a little festival called Burning Man on a beach in California. More than 20 years later, this week-long extravaganza has moved to the Nevada desert and creates a temporary city of 50,000 people. One of the most striking things about this city is that — after the citizens have paid their $300-plus entry fee — there is no money exchanged inside its borders. Instead, everybody brings everything they need for the whole week and live by exchanging gifts with the other citizens. According to founder Larry Harvey, the difference between a market and a gift economy is that the former is based on scarcity while the latter is based on abundance. And he says a gift economy fosters what Robert Putnam called “social capital”, that is, it forms connections between people.

The gifts that are given on the Burning Man playa range from handmade necklaces to fresh oysters on ice (yes, in the middle of the desert) to large-scale art installations.

Deron Beal, founder of Freecycle, notes that giving — not just charity — has a long tradition. “In Berkeley, there [was] a telephone pole which everyone knew. If you wanted to give something away you just put it underneath that pole and they called it the Giving Pole,” he says.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the ideal is a world without money. Is that even possible? Some believe that capitalism has had its day. We’ve now got too much ‘stuff’ in the world and we can stop now. Freegans, for example, aim to live without money at all. They ‘dumpster dive’ for food, clothing and other goods; they walk and bicycle rather than spend money on transport they see as ecologically disastrous; they indulge in what they call ‘urban foraging’ for the almost-new rejects of this overly padded society.

They have “freemeets” and fair days called “really, really free markets” (to highlight the inequalities of the so-called ‘free market’ of capitalism) where everything is given away.

That dream might take a while, but in the meantime, organisations like Freecycle have taken the idea to an organised, global level.

“Capital markets have a bad time of measuring the environmental impact of our items just being thrown away rather than being reused,” says Beal. “Currently there is no number being placed on how much CO2 is in the environment as far as the monetary damage being done there. I like to think that the ultimate goal of Freecycle is to complement the capital markets and capital economy with a gift economy that enables reduction in impact on the environment while capturing things that still have functional reuse rather than monetary use.”

William McDonough, a designer/architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, goes so far as to call waste a design flaw.

“If everyone were to consume the way [Americans] do we would need five planets to provide all the raw materials and that’s just not sustainable,” says Beal. “At some point we will have to start rethinking how we are doing things. Once we are able to start producing things by reusing materials and not using materials that permanently degrade the environment we will start thinking in cycles of production and reuse rather than a linear model of extraction from the environment to production to consumption to disposal or waste of the item in landfills.”

Sidebar: Deron Beal, Freecycle
Deron Beal, 41, started Freecycle in Tucson, Arizona after his job with a recycling non-profit kept turning up items that weren’t recyclable but needed homes. Now, the organisation has more than 5.3 million members in more than 85 countries and has just topped the 100,000 member mark in Australia. He is interviewed by Rosanne Bersten.

NETT: How did you come up with the idea of Freecycle?

DB: I was working at RISE and I would go out with the recycling crews and occasionally would see an old desk or computer or whatever sitting next to the bin that we were picking up. We filled up an entire warehouse full of non-recyclable but still good stuff. It just took off from there. I sent out the first email on May 1st 2003 and it went to about thirty or forty friends and a handful of non-profits. Within a month we had 600-800 members which ironically at the time I thought was much too large to possibly succeed.

[Then] we got an article in a national magazine here called Utne Reader and we suddenly had probably fifteen or twenty cities applying to join all at once. We knew it was coming so we set up the website in a way that would instruct them how to join. Some of the earlier groups included Portland, Seattle, Kansas City, pretty much all in the US.

NETT: You want Freecycle to be about recycling and participating rather than some sort of grab-bag for the greedy.

DB: People join for the recycling benefit and to keep good stuff out of landfills. The second benefit was totally unanticipated: the community building element. Unlike putting something on the curb where it just disappears, you actually get to pick who receives your item with Freecycle. Maybe it is a single mother or someone who is going off to college or a local non-profit organisation, it is up to you. Eventually you meet that person face to face when they pick the item up from you.

There are a lot of related stories about different non-profits who got set up using Freecycle in times of disaster. [During] Hurricane Katrina, people pulled together to help each other using Freecycle; the beauty is you don’t get a bunch of winter coats for Hurricane Katrina but rather one person asks for exactly what they need and another person can give them exactly what they are asking for.

NETT: Despite the name, there must be some costs…

DB: Technically there is one full time staff — that is, me — but there are three other people that we pay on a contractor basis to do different elements like the web master, the fellow that is doing our new website coding and someone else who is our volunteer co-ordinator. We have 10,000 volunteers worldwide so that is a big job.

We are a charitable non-profit organisation, which means we are tax deductable and we survive on grants underwriting the public support and it is always very tight. We are having to pay for between six and 10 very large servers at any given time which can be quite expensive. We have had to cut lots of corners and for example all our local groups are Yahoo groups which means we don’t have the expense of [hosting them]. We have between one and two million unique site visitors per month on our website and anywhere between 10 and 15 million unique site visitors that are visiting the local groups in Yahoo Groups.

We are designing email functionality for our new website which means you wouldn’t have to go to Yahoo Groups. I think it was a hundred gigs a day that would be required to handle the email functionality, just some outrageously large number. When you get to this scale it is pretty amazing. In fact on yahoo.com they do a rating each year of the most searched terms by category. Most searched term last year for conservation or environment was recycling, number two was global warming and number three was Freecycle. That is pretty incredible. Al Gore came after us.

NETT: That is pretty flattering. Do you think that this is possible because we are living in a more charitable era?

DB: I think originally what fuelled our growth was the environmental aspect of what we are doing. What you see internationally is this really strong [sense] kicking in that we need to get our acts together and start to be more aware of our consumptive behaviour.

I think more short term depending on the country we are definitely seeing an economic aspect with the financial credit crisis that seems to be having impact on world markets. We are definitely seeing short-term increased growth numbers in regard to that as well.

NETT: Is there just too much stuff in the world?

DB: My take is, there is enough stuff in the world. We just need to get it out in circulation.

NETT: I love the vision of a world where we just stop producing things because we’ve got enough and we just keep swapping it and repairing it.

DB: Yeah and it doesn’t seem like it is that far fetched when you think about [it]. If you are making something new, make it out of recycled materials, right?

We are keeping over five tones a day out of land fills through Freecycle. Five times the height of Mount Everest in the past year alone has been reused via Freecycle so that is a big pile of stuff.

NETT: Any advice?

DB: Empower individuals to do what they enjoy rather than trying to find ways of doing it for them. That is a big part of why Freecycle has been successful. We didn’t try to centrally own or command Freecycle, rather we tried to develop tools centrally that people could get excited about and use directly themselves. I think you see a lot of that happening on the Internet these days where there is shareware or Firefox and things of this nature where it’s not a requirement to have a major multi-national structure to get something new going. If you have a good idea and you are able to channel that in the right way there is a lot of potential there for development and growth.