I just read about this new site http://www.justfortheloveofit.org for people to network and share.
The guy who started it is walking from Ireland to India with no money. Check it out: http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/p_story.php
Our friend Daniel sent us this link to a site about Venture Communism (http://www.telekommunisten.net/venture-communism) - Venture Capitalists there's some new competition!
Wow, this not-for-profit site connects travellers around the world with free places to stay!
http://www.couchsurfing.com
and this one does too: http://www.globalfreeloaders.com!
I ran into a friend of mine from college a few weeks ago. She told me about the child care cooperative she belongs to in Brooklyn. It's really simple. There are several families that share in child care. If one member needs a baby sitter, they send out an email to the other families on the list and then someone volunteers. They never have to pay for babysitting and the children in the network get to play together often, it's pretty awesome.
Here are some articles about this idea. It seems there are some formal ways to do it but it seems like the informal way works just as well.
http://web.uvic.ca/bcics/research/social/Child_Care/what.htm
http://parents.berkeley.edu/recommend/groups/coop.html
www.associatedcontent.com/article/160741/how_to_plan_and_start_a_babysitting.html
http://www.babycenter.com/refcap/baby/babychildcare/51.html
According to their website,http://creativecommons.org/ purpose is "Enabling the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works."
You can download and use materials from the site and you can upload and share your own. Each user decides and designates the terms of re-use.
The Prelinger Library is a physical space in San Francisco. Their website describes it as:
"An access-oriented, image-rich experimental research library of books, printed ephemera, and over 600 periodical titles. Serving readers, artists, scholars and other iconoclastic thinkers. Centered on histories of U.S. regions, culture, industry, landscape, natural history, media, and politics (and other things). Open to the public."
The Prelinger Library is appropriation friendly.
To visit, check on their site for open hours Prelinger Library.
Archive.org's tag line is "Universal access to human knowledge." It is a website that allows users to download movies, documents, and audio materials for research and upload their own materials to share with others. It is an awesome resource that helps perpetuate a more open culture.