1. Giff-Gaff (http://giffgaff.com)
Giff-Gaff is a mobile phone network where members support each other, and are rewarded in credit for doing so. They have strong ethics and develop their service based on member feedback. On their website they state:
We believe in the power of the community. When the community succeeds, we succeed - and vice versa.
Community aspects:
- member to member support forums
- reward for contributions (forums feature unanswered questions and voting)
- reliance on members to resolve your issue
- evidence of change due to member input
Whipcar is a car rental company where you can offer your own car up for rental or rent other cars from neighbours in your area.
Community aspects:
- allows you to rent your own car to local people
- allows you to rent cars from your neighbours (and you are rewarded for encouraging them to sign up)
- relies on a critical mass of people in your neighbourhood using it in order to work - there are two cars in my town, neither very close to my house...
So what?
If you take it as truth that by working together we can achieve things more quickly and more cheaply, then how does this apply to life at a university? I'm not talking about shared knowledge and social learning - which I wholeheartedly endorse, but ways we can improve the non-academic part of university life by borrowing from these commercial models. [oh yes, and putting to one side the desire of these companies to get my money from me!]
Here are some starter ideas of how I think we can take the community aspects above and re-use them at an institution like a university:
1. Encourage students and staff to support each other through online forums.
We are already exploring this for technical support to set up the multitude of mobile devices that exist on the university network as there are too many to provide individual documentation for centrally - however why not extend this to other areas of university life? I've used this model successfully in the past for students to self-support each other through an induction game.
Our in-house social network Community@Brighton can support this kind of open forum, but perhaps should be encouarged much more obviously and although a financial reward system is probably not viable, perhaps a voting recognition reward system might be enough. Something to explore when we build out new staff intranet platform perhaps?
2. Rent stuff from people within your Community
Ok, not cars. But how about electrical kit - scanners, digital cameras etc. The university offer a loan service, but can't always meet demand and sometimes it would be good to just borrow a scanner for the weekend to complete your project - if you can't afford to buy one, then a low price (or better still credit system) to borrow one from someone who lives in the same halls of residence as you would be ideal.
Likewise there are long periods in the summer where students are at home and probably have lots of spare stuff that could be made use of by someone else. Facilitating this requires some kind of brokering service to be set up - which again could be community run.
Critical Mass
All of the above - the commercial stuff and my extrapolations - rely on sufficient take up by the community to be successful. I'll be interested to watch WhipCar and see if they can achieve that. Both of my examples reward existing members (financially) in order to encourage new members to join. I hope to come up with a credit/reward model that doesn't involve money but yet is engaging enough to work within an institution, I'm not convinced recognition will be enough on it's own.
I welcome your thoughts and other examples - we are part of a captive membership at a university, how can we effectively use that huge community to benefit each other more effectively?
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