I was very grateful to be able to participate in a really exciting workshop at NESTA on collaborative consumption. Rachel Botsman has been in the UK promoting her book ‘What’s mine is yours; how collaborative consumption is changing the way we live‘ and has subsequently been giving talks and presentations.
I was lucky enough to present The People’s Kitchen project I’m working on at the start of the session. I received some great questions from the other participants. People were interested in finding out who comes along, how it is being funded, what a typical donation is and are supermarkets ever concerned about being sued by giving away food past their sell by date?
The workshop session was focused around how the rise of collaborative consumption can impact on Public Services, particularly in these difficult times. The group I worked with was on how to re-invent the service offering and business model of libraries! Facilitated by the excellent Mok from Innovation Beehive, we acted out an idea around changing libraries into a zoned space allowing it to used in different days during the day.
NESTA workshop
I came away from the workshop feeling very positive about how collaborative consumption can help our public services. We need to come together and share our experiences and skills to help improve what we already have. There are a large number of opportunities out there for developing the services we use – we must not be scared about changing the way we currently do and view things.
Louise Wilson 
You can read the book watch the film attend the workshop and listen to the speech but you may be hard-pressed to point to an instance of where you have recently had first hand experience of the wonderful new approach that the guru is trying to sell..So it was surprising the other day to realize that my young daughter was talking to me about the concept of collaborative consumption even though she had never read a book or listened to a talk about it..I had offered to buy her some music CDs as a reward for getting good scores at school and she replied Actually downloading from iTunes is a lot cheaper. .Indeed that is obvious. It is one of three central ideas underpinning collaborative consumption. And it may be true to say that collectively we are all beginning to shift our focus from products to services..Collaborative consumption is all around you.I have now begun to look for other examples that fit within the collaborative consumption model.