Zumbara

Description

EMRAH GÜLER:

'Zumbara, sharing and saving your time Zumbara, an abbreviation of Time Bank, or more like, Time Piggy Bank, is an innovative sharing platform where time is used instead of money, a community in which talents, skills and experiences are shared. This gift-based, alternative sharing economy allows users to earn an hour for every hour of service they provide. You can choose to spend your hour whichever way you want, as long as it is not more than the hours you have given. With over 15,000 users registered to the website, zumbara.com, and over 1,000 hours of monthly service exchanged, Zumbara users offer anything from language practice and script writing to dance lessons and CV writing. “The services are limited only by your imagination,” said Ayşegül Güzel, the co-founder of Zumbara. “Preparing playlists, character analyses using colors, watching meteor showers, writing plays for kindergartens, and making houses out of hay are some of the more creative services offered in the website.” Güzel said the time bank system was used in various ways in 35 countries, from the UK and USA to Japan and China. In fact, the origins of use of time as an alternative economy goes back to 1827 when the American Josiah Warren established the Cincinnati Time Center as an alternative economy experiment. “What Zumbara offers as an alternative to global examples is its incorporation of web 2.0, or social technologies, into the time bank system,” said Güzel. “With social technologies, we intend to make the time bank system more effective and efficient, helping the movement to grow faster all around the world.”

Thanks to social media, Zumbara has spread from an online presence to real communities, mainly in universities, across different cities in Turkey, including Istanbul, İzmir, Ankara, Denizli, Eskişehir and Antalya. Güzel said that the sharing economy is on an exponential rise across the world: “Hopefully, the sharing economy will be able to threaten the global economic growth. We will all then lead more peaceful, less anxious lives.” The simple sentence on Zumbara’s manifesto says it all: “Life is more pleasant when shared.” (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/sharing-and-gift-economies-bloom-in-turkey.aspx?)