Britton - Honors, awards

Public Interest Project (Example)

Now that you have had a look at the concept of carsharing from the vantage of industry, I would like to invite you to recast your minds and consider it briefly as an innovative approach to public interest advancement. (If you have not, please check out the introductory materials set out here in the Redefining the Motor Car section of this site and of course the full web site for the World Carshare Consortium.)

The challenge I faced back in 1997 was that of how to drum up international support for this poorly understood and insufficiently supported (mainly by local and national government, both of which have important roles in making this concept work) terrific sustainability concept, without having to go through the somewhat humiliating and also somewhat intellectually constraining step of going hat in hand to ferret out a foundation or public sector agency willing to provide the funding needed to do this.

Worse yet, I was aware that if I set out for the purposes of this support some kind of fixed detailed plan of the sort that they inevitably require -- bearing in mind on the one hand the nature of life in this ever-moving and changing world, and no less the reality of the tools that we have to work with which are of course in terribly fast and continuous evolution -- I would paint myself into a corner since the commissioning bureaucracy would certainly want me to follow out my original plan (despite the fact that everyone knows that there is such a thing in life as a learning curve and that in situations like this it tends to be pretty steep). No, clearly this was not going to work for me.

So I decided to fund and do it myself, and to the extend possible take advantage both of the terrific low-cost communications tools today at our disposal (read the web, email and when you need it even the phone), and see if I could create a pretty light framework for international collaboration and exchange.

What was been done thus far, you will find clearly and without apologies set out in the World Carshare Consortium, which I think I can safely say is the world's "first stop shop" for information and insight in this great if not necessarily yet fully recognized workable sustainability concept which is carsharing. (Incidentally, carsharing is an example fo a class of initiatives that I call an 'idée géniale' and that's why this approach seems to be working in this case. It is not so sure that the same approach would work in other less 'genial' cases).

To conclude: Does this mean that I would not be pleased to have foundation or other support for continuing and indeed improving this tool set. You bet I would, but it should be on a basis that corresponds with the nature of the challenge and the wide open process that I consider the best way to go about it. So if you have any ideas for me on this score, well now you know how to get in touch.

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