Participation and Sharing Economy: The Spanish Case of #Compartirmola

Abstract

Sharing economy, collaborative consumption or Participation Economy is changing our economy the way we know it. The tipping point at this moment is the fact that the Internet is giving us the chance to build this new economy under scalable and massive models. This paper is focused on a case study about a Spanish online movement called #compartirmola (“sharing is cool”), which is analyzed to identify forty collaborative initiatives from Spanish companies. The mixed quantitative and qualitative method of this research will be useful to describe the actions that were utilized to give it visibility. The film was launched on December 2014, in Madrid. Our focus was to analyze the actions of online dissemination of this film, as well as the synergies between business models (as crowdfunding) and viral strategies within social networks. Finally, we interviewed one of the producers of the film. This study will help us to understand the social experience which is narrowly connected to the new models of Sharing Economy or Participation Economy offered by some companies (Cabify, Tutellus, Uber…), as well as the roles of social networks for disseminating the main messages and goals, such as crowdfunding, online visibility or lobbying. This is a preprint version of the paper.