Sure. I’m a Navy brat, which meant we moved every couple of years until I was a teenager. A challenging but also enriching experience when you have to uproot and be the new kid in town multiple times. It gave me an awareness of the wider world, along with some comfort with uncertainty and different social groups. It also gave me mixed feelings about community. On the one hand, I really want it. On the other hand, I’m wary of the pressure to conform that comes with it.

No overseas duty stations. Just Maine, Virginia, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, along with two places in California — Monterey and San Diego. And I spent summers in Massachusetts and Mississippi, since my mom and dad are from there, respectively.

I went to a bunch of different public schools and for college, I went to George Mason University and then Georgetown University for a master’s in Communications, Culture, and Technology (CCT), a new program in 1996. I was in the first class of what might be the first graduate program in the world focused on the impact of the Internet on society.

Well before I got to the sharing thing, I was in the corporate world. I defaulted to that because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. That was the source of much frustration.

Yes, eventually. There were two big milestones.

One breakthrough was catalyzed by asking myself a simple question — what am I truly interested in? This is circa 1995. After some reflection, I realized I was interested in American culture and the just then emerging Internet. I decided to look for projects at the intersection of culture and the Internet. This led to discovering CCT before it started by volunteering at Georgetown’s American Studies Crossroads Project, an online archive of American culture artifacts.

The program at Georgetown set me on a new career path in industry analysis and strategy. One early step on that path was an internship at the National Telephone Cooperative Association where I researched Internet diffusion in rural areas with Dr. Linda Garcia, who a few years earlier had written a groundbreaking report on the prospects of the Internet for the Office of Technology Assessment (a now defunct branch of congress). She predicted how transformative the Internet would be. Just under ten years later, the style of thinking I learned from her led me to believe that the Internet could facilitate resource sharing on an industrial scale.

The other pivotal moment was when I was doing strategy work for a Fortune 500 transportation company, commuting between San Francisco and Brussels, which was initially exciting, but ultimately proved super alienating.

This was circa 2004. Before the transcontinental commuting, I had already concluded sharing could be huge. I was actively networking to refine my ideas about sharing, find fellow travelers, and look for opportunities.

I was part of a social milieu in San Francisco of sustainability buffs, but I found the intense focus on high technology lacking (solar panels, EVs, etc). I thought that bigger sustainability gains could be had by re-organizing everyday life around resource sharing.

Everything came to a head one sunny Saturday morning in Brussels. I left my hotel for a jog along my usual route in a business park. I got to the top of a hill, stopped in front of this warehouse parking lot, and started crying.

I thought to myself, I can’t do this corporate work anymore, I’m lonely, my friendships back home are fading due to all the travel, I wasn’t fully pursuing my passion for sharing, I was going to miss out. I forecasted a mountain of regret if I didn’t change course.

But then things got deeper. My life flashed before my eyes. I realized that a thread connected all my experiences — that I struggled alone to become myself and that it fundamentally didn’t work. On paper, I had some success, but the reality was that after several decades I was an unsatisfactory realization of a human being. Deep down I felt desperate, alone, incomplete, and even shame for my condition.

But what really got me was that I felt that I was far from alone. Perhaps billions of people felt similarly in our modern society. To realize that so many others suffered like I did, and much worse, was overwhelming. I walked across the parking lot to the side of the warehouse, dropped to my knees, and just bawled. I shook my fists to the sky and asked God what I should do.

I didn’t get an answer, but I made a vow on the spot to do whatever it took, just one person, to build a life filled with meaning, purpose, and community, and help others do the same. And I knew sharing could help me do this.

Then I literally ran back to my hotel room, emailed a resignation letter and booked the next flight home.

No, there was no plan. But I now had the one thing that I had been missing: commitment, of a kind I had never felt before in my life. It was such a relief. I finally had a mission!

Prior to this, I had thought a lot about sharing as a social change strategy. I recognized that resource sharing was strategic, it can address a lot of needs simultaneously. If done right, it can make goods more accessible, build community, reduce our environmental footprint, support local economies, and more.

But this intellectual work wasn’t enough to spur action. I was scared to commit. My moment of satori in the parking lot gave me the spiritual charge I needed to get going.

I wanted to start a sharing movement. But I realized that’s not something I could do alone, I needed to create a community. But rather than finding the others, my friends Scott Levkoff, Maritza Shafer, Polly Whittaker, and I created a way for the others to find us. We started a monthly salon called the Abundance League. It was a combination gift circle and speaker series that ran for five years, one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

Abundance League’s secret sauce was the gift circles held before the presentations. In a circle, each of us would take a turn sharing what we were passionate about, what we had to offer others, and what we needed to move our abundance projects forward. It created a fun and uplifting real-time exchange of support for community projects.

Over time, an incredible mutual aid network emerged that gave me a tangible experience of what it’s like to live in a real sharing economy. It was magical. Resources and opportunities flowed. Life was easier and more fun. I was part of a community binded by a shared purpose. I found meaningful work along the way. I felt more complete as a human than ever.

My co-leadership of the Abundance League led to an opportunity to help write a grant proposal for a sharing movement nonprofit. Louis Fox and Jonah Sachs from Free Range Graphics brought me in because they knew I was the quote-unquote sharing guy in San Francisco. This is how I met the folks from the SHIFT Foundation, which co-founded Shareable with me and have supported us ever since.

Yes, at first. Then I did a lot of research for the plan and realized, hey, we don’t need to start a sharing movement. There already is one, we just needed to highlight and connect what’s already out there. And so that’s what we did.

Yes, I knew about cooperatives from my time at the National Telephone Cooperative association and solidarity economy activists regularly attended our Abundance League events.

In fact, Shareable’s publishing and organizing efforts attempted to put Internet enabled sharing (later called the sharing economy), the solidarity economy, the commons, open source software, all the open X movements (open government, education, etc.), bike sharing, car sharing, coworking, tool libraries, and more on one level to show that sharing already permeated everyday life and was on the rise.

Yes, we launched in September 2009.

We didn’t get a lot of pushback, mainly because we were totally unknown at first. But this broad view of sharing presented challenges to measure our impact and fund our work.

There were other challenges, too, like how do you talk about this in a coherent way? How do you put ideas like open source software on the same level as a cooperative?

Our core readers, they got it. Whereas a casual visitor to Shareable.net might be a bit perplexed, coming to read about bike sharing and wondering how that’s connected to cooperatives.

Yes, no one had asserted the commonalities before and called it a trend or movement. But enough people got it that a global sharing movement did start to form around the idea.

Yes, we actually catalyzed the Sharing Cities movement. We started by pointing out the ripe opportunities for sharing in cities with our first batch of articles that we launched with in September 2009.

In 2011, we took a much bigger step. We held the first conference about resource sharing and cities. We gathered a mix of San Francisco stakeholders from nonprofits, city government, and social enterprises, all talking about how new technologies can amplify cities as a platform for sharing, and how sharing solutions can address key challenges in cities like their carbon footprints and inequities.

This got Mayor Lee’s attention. We educated the mayor and his innovation lead Jay Nath about the sharing trend, inspired them to form a sharing economy policy group, and was one of the main organizers of the launch event early the following year. The launch event was at SPUR, the urban policy think tank in town. It was the most attended event in their 100+ year history. The place was packed.

I keynoted with the mayor, and then moderated a panel. We followed that event with a policy guide for Sharing Cities, ongoing coverage of Sharing Cities, and then created the Sharing Cities Network.

Our work with San Francisco helped inspire Mayor Park of Seoul to take action in 2012.

It’s much bigger and more holistic. The goal of Sharing City Seoul is to mainstream sharing as a lifestyle. It goes well beyond policy support to helping incubate sharing enterprises, opening up government assets for sharing, promotion of sharing as a lifestyle, and experimental projects to find the best way forward.

Sharing City Seoul proved a huge catalyst for the Sharing Cities movement. Seoul is a technologically advanced megacity. Mayor Park had a global reputation and this was one of his signature programs. He put the weight of Seoul and his reputation behind sharing using the same logic that Shareable used to talk about the problems sharing could solve in cities.

This helped create a global movement that eventually involved around 100 cities.

Right, we published Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons in 2018. It was our statement that Sharing Cities isn’t about platforms and capitalism — it’s about the urban commons. We drew this line in the sand with the book’s case studies and model policies, which also illustrated that a complete urban commons was possible. All the pieces already existed. They just hadn’t been assembled in a single place, but could be. We argued that Sharing Cities is a concrete utopia, one that is well within reach.

Yeah, we painted this picture of a broad sharing movement with our editorial — sharing startups and tool libraries — and putting them all on the same level. But as the mainstream media picked this up, their take became narrower and narrower over time until the sharing economy was just Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.

And you know, originally, some of those companies really did have a communitarian ethos. And then it became big, big money — tens of billions of dollars poured in. That communitarian ethos evaporated and these platforms became extractive.

This development was distressing, but it gave us the opportunity to present a foil to the extractive sharing economy. For example, I commissioned Nathan Schneider to write about a trend I noticed that was a reaction to the VC-backed sharing economy — entrepreneurs that combined a platform business model with a cooperative ownership and governance structure. His 2014 Shareable article, “Owning Is the New Sharing,” and subsequent writing and organizing, along with Trebor Scholz’s work, catalyzed the platform cooperative movement.

Yes, Sharing Cities Seoul is still underway. They recently published their third plan for the project, although things slowed down during the pandemic. But I think Sharing Cities has legs and will continue to bear fruit in different ways going forward.

Yeah, absolutely, that was the whole point of our book. A year or two after we published the book, I went to Seoul for a gathering hosted by Mayor Park to talk about the next steps for Sharing City Seoul. And he hinted that the next version of Sharing Cities would be purely commons based. He actually gathered the commons thinkers I credited in our book as inspirations. So I thought, great, this mayor is listening, let’s see what happens.

Yes, I’ve resigned as Executive Director and am staying on as board president. As to Shareable’s direction, we’ve been mulling this concept we call sharing hubs — hyperlocal centers that support sharing in a variety of ways. That’s a possibility for Shareable, but it’s all TBD at this point.

In general, we’re thinking about doing things that are more programmatic with easier to measure impact versus broader movement work, and doing it in communities where it can do the most good.

We’re thinking of them like platforms for a local ecosystem of projects. We might layer on a lifestyle element like a calendar of sharing events that work well with different seasons. But again, things are still in flux.

Yes, one of our partners doing similar work is the NorCal Resilience Network. And we’ve written about the Participatory City project’s pioneering work in the U.K. Like them, we recognize that all the cool community projects that can bring a neighborhood to life — things like a time bank, tool library, bike kitchen — they’re chronically unstable. But if they’re supported together as a network, they might have a better chance of persisting and growing.

I’m gonna go full sabbatical. I’ve done this twice before in my life, one year each, about 10 years apart. Each time I’ve taken a long break from wage earning, I’ve come away with more commitment and capacity, with more insight into myself and the world. Luckily, I have a super supportive partner, and living well within my means supports this practice. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s truly life changing, and we’re in a time when retooling as a social entrepreneur makes sense.

It’s a time when old things are failing and new things aren’t yet fully formed, a time between worlds and narratives. For me, it’s time to leave the field fallow so there’s more fertility next season, and perhaps I’ll re-emerge with a new or refined mission, something that the moment calls for that I feel called to do. That’s the intention. I’m excited to see what unfolds.