Here are some projects and things I've been involved in.
BeWelcome
| It's wonderful: people with spare rooms / floor space give travellers to their part of the world a place to stay for free, and cultural exchange ensues.
It restores my faith in basic humanity and kindness, and I've met lots of interesting people from the places I've travelled to. You get a much better insight into somewhere you travel by meeting somebody who actually lives there.
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Couchsurfing
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Sadly the "owner" of this hospitality exchange community has turned this non-profit into a privately-owned company. I can no longer support it as this arrangement does not reflect the message of cultural freedom it purportedly represents. I will write more to explain why at some point soon.
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Lady Windermere's Fan
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An audio-book production of Oscar Wilde's first ever play, done through the Recorded Drama Society (see below). I was involved as director, producer, and did a bit of acting.
The recording is now part of Wikimedia Commons, and used on the Wikipedia page for the play, and thus available to everybody in a free and (almost) unrestricted way forever, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
It's set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, using a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike recording.
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Recorded Drama Society
| Society of the University of Cambridge. I was one of three founding members who wanted to create a space for the creation of audio drama. Cambridge already has a thriving stage drama scene, and everybody there loves Radio 4, so we bought some recording equipment and sought contributions.
It turns out organising theatre, even when it's made a lot easier without stage design, ticket sales, and costumes, is hard, and it's a shame the society has fizzled out over the last year or so. I would generally be happy to help out anybody wanting to reignite this, or create a similar thing elsewhere.
| Zopa
| A new way to lend or borrow money. Your money as a lender is lent directly to borrowers, and Zopa acts as a marketplace for lenders and borrowers, and sets up the contracts and suchlike. They make their money by charging a one-time fee to borrowers for arranging their loan.
- The evil banking industry middlemen are circumvented. Interest is paid to real people.
- You can reasonably easily make more interest than high-street savings accounts, and rates for borrowers are typically low.
- Borrowers can repay early with no penalty, encouraging responsible borrowing.
- Risk is reduced by credit checking applicants, spreading your money across many borrowers (typically your exposure is only £10 to any one borrower), and estimated 'bad debt' rates are calculated to help you set an appropriate interest rate.
- It's a good way to diversify your investments with little effort.
I've been using it since 2007 and made a return of around 10% per annum.
| | Cartridges4Charity | A small social enterprise I set up in 2003. Using the web site, people with empty printer cartridges send them to us (using a freepost address) for recycling. The cartridges received are refilled and sold as 'compatible' cartridges - much cheaper than the originals made by the original printer manufacturers. This raises funds for our charity partners, and the environment benefits too as resources are conserved. | |
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