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Talks and Poster Presentations (without Proceedings-Entry):

G. Fitzpatrick:
"Local Sharing Communities: from rhetoric to reality";
Keynote Lecture: Smart City Symposium 2016, Vienna, Austria (invited); 2016-08-24.



English abstract:
While the sharing economy is growing and apparently here to stay, there is a critique of monetised services such as Airbnb, that they are becoming increasingly driven from a profit motive and have lost touch with some of the initial idealism and motivations around these services. Some of these motivations included promoting sustainability and collaborative consumption of resources, and promoting social connectivity and community building. For many people, the more altruistic and community/sustainability oriented motives still hold and exchange services such as time banking and food sharing are also the gaining increasing attention as people explore new possibilities for civic engagement, collaborative consumption and welfare structures. A key feature of these services is their focus on the local community level. Another key feature is that exchanges are not monetized but valued in other ways. It would be more accurate here then to talk about the sharing community rather than the sharing economy. But how to `do´ such new services well, and how to design technologies to best support such services is still a matter of trial and error and reflection and the shift from the idealist rhetoric of `sharing and community´ to the day-to-day realities of making such a service work is non-trivial. This presentation will focus on not-for-profit and non-monetised exchange services and explore the issues entailed in establishing and running these new forms of exchange, how technologies are being used as enablers, and what lessons can be learnt to date.

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.