Better Living Through Sharing
Can we put our belongings to better use? Can sharing be a model to benefit us, others and our ecosystem? We recently met up with Ron Williams, John Goodwin, and Mike Goia, the team behind SnapGoods, an innovative Dumbo startup tackling this very issue. SnapGood’s goal is to enable us to get more use out of the things we own and reduce the amount of things we need to buy, while benefiting financially from this approach. The site serves as an interface that connects individuals who want to rent out their services and belongings to those who are in temporary need of them. There’s even a way to buy an item afterwards if you liked it. SnapGood’s intention is to abstract the issues of making environmentally and socially beneficial decisions, allowing users to simply do good for themselves while (consciously or not) doing good for us all.

Trust
A while back, I took “Not Owning: Systems of sharing,” a class with Parsons faculty member Cameron Tonkinwise. We analyzed numerous online services designed to help individuals share more. We discussed the ways of thinking about property and ownership, and how these can in turn affect the lives of objects - whether we hold onto them without using them, or share them openly with others. Time and again the major challenge that kept arising in these systems (and that was often overlooked) was accounting for trust. When normal systems of trust break down - for instance in a large pool strangers attempting to share stuff - money turns out to be a great way to mitigate the hindrance. In prototyping their service, the SnapGoods team seems to have hit and intuitively addressed this issue by incorporating a variety of features in the sharing model like insurance, security deposits and profile reputations to help the whole thing work.

Thanks guys for the studio visit, inspiration, and getting people together for a common good - oh snap! SnapGoods is currently in private beta, but you can apply for an invite at SnapGoods.com.