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.