OuishareFest 2017

Sharing Economy – Sharing Future

Can you imagine a place where exchanging business cards, using compost toilets, pitching start-ups, doing meditation and covering face and hair with colorful glitter in preparation for a wild dance don’t contradict but complement each other? That is OuiShareFest!

The Meditating Eco Manager Geek

What really astonished me about OuiShareFest was this: eco folks, business penguins, IT geeks and self-development gurus meet, intermingle and melt together. With integrated system thinking this unusual mélange opens up to new economic and social paradigms. The majority of speakers and participants were under 30. There was a tendency of “older” people (30+) to learn from the youth instead of the other way around.

OuiShareFest: Cities of the World, Unite!

The focus of this year’s three days OuishareFest in a suburb of Paris was the new role of cities in the world. Forty cities around the globe joined together as C40 to tackle climate change. Unlike heads of state who have a lot of territorial, trade and power topics on their agendas, majors have a big interest in making their city a place in which people like to live. Cities can implement local actions directly. Check #CitiesforClimate in Social Media.

Speakers and participants create and share ideas for an economy and a lifestyle that pay respect to human needs and planetary boundaries. They envision a system that caters to the 99 percent, not to the 1 percent. The formats were vey diverse and included talks and discussions of „experts“, interactive formats like group discussions, fishbowls, interactive theatre, card games and role-plays.

Co-Creating a Regenerative World

The official program of OuiShareFest never started before 2 pm. Participants were encouraged to offer workshops in the free mornings. I took the opportunity and spontaneously offered a session on “Co-creating a Regenerative World”. I used tools of Dragon Dreaming to envision a place and system in which humans and all living beings can live happily and comfortably without destroying the planet.  With mind mapping we then collected ideas on how to make this vision become true and step into action. My workshop proved to be a success. This encouraged me to continue with this format. I will develop it for longer sessions and larger groups of participants.

Co-creating a Regenerative World

Sharing is the New Owning

Ownership was more than once a point of discussion. In my personal opinion a new role of ownership is the key to transitioning the economy into a future-proof system. A principal of a business school stated that capitalism was detrimental to the world! This opened up discussion about how to make revenue with commons (open-source, non-patented tools or information). It became quite obvious that co-creation and co-owning (of decisions, projects, places and goods) will become more important in the future.

Companies will not treat people as consumers anymore, but as co-creators. While in a co-creative process, the personal clinging to one’s own idea and connecting it with one’s own ego can kill the whole process. At the same time the role of experts will change and may even become obsolete in some areas. And one question remained: who will own Artificial Intelligence once it has become independent of human?

Hello Money, My Old Friend

One session I found particularly amazing at OuiShareFest was a role-play discussion of a person with his/her money. One person was herself/himself. The other person played her/his

money. The aim was to detox the power of money and to release it from our projections by engaging in a dialogue with it.

First we realized that money is not more than paper, ink, metal or data. When we started a dialogue, the facilitator provided questions and tasks to guide the discussion with our money. Each dialogue started out with the money stating that it is here to serve the person. The person then had to answer when he/she last talked to “money”. The journey took us through everything we did together in the past, involved the question if person was afraid of losing money or if person needs money.

The exercise supported and confirmed my view of money as an enabler. For me, money is like fire: a good servant but a bad master.

The World is Getting Better and Better

OuiShareFest 2017 was a great possibility to understand where young people will drive our future economy and society. I am very happy to find so many people working towards change in our old systems. Ideas turn into concrete actions and eventually change our planet towards a regenerative network.

 

Sign up for the Student of the World Newsletter 

 

Find out what young changemakers in the Utopian Township Auroville think of the future economy

Economic Dimensions of Tomorrow's World
Economic Dimensions of Tomorrow’s World

 

Find out how digital nomads envision the future of work

Future of Work
The Future of Work – Envisioned by Digital Nomads

 

Finance Your Own Social Work

Hybrid Business Model - How to Finance Your Own Social Work
Hybrid Business Model – How to Finance Your Own Social Work

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.