Birthing a Gift Economy Nipun Mehta and Friends

 
In a gift economy, goods and services are given without any strings attached; it is an economic system where wealth is decreased by hoarding and it is the circulation of the gifts within the community that leads to increase -- increase in connections, increase in relationship strength. Gift-Economy is an ancient, indigenous idea that is curiously finding its footing in the modern, Internet economy. People have always put together birthday parties, just for the love of it. But now, people are writing entire encyclopedias in that spirit! Throw in some collaboration tools, and unpaid engineers are producing an operating system to rival a $400 billion company. Add the power of self-publishing, and volunteer-citizens are able to topple lobbyists and bring radical policy changes. In the past, we could do little things as gifts, but big things required money, power and influence. Not anymore. The web is increasingly becoming a land of the free. Now, the Internet is able to aggregate non-financial motivations of "amateurs" to organize into significant social movements, purely for the sake of goodness. In this gathering, Nipun Mehta will share lessons from his experiments with the gift-economy, both personally and institutionally, and discuss small steps that anyone can take to align with the trust and abundance of the gift-economy.