Photo by William White on Unsplash

Sharing, renting or hiring is a way to get access to assets or expertise that you don’t own or have. There are so many life scenarios in which you might hire or borrow. We’ve got a good sense of the common ones, but we seek the wisdom of the crowd to find the less obvious, or surprising, ones. (Yep, there are more examples than Airbnb, Uber and the local lawn mower store!)

Your mission, should you choose:

‘Scenarios’ is just a fancy word for a story. We invite you to write up a true story of when you, (or someone you know) rented, borrowed or hired an asset or person. This can be the perspective of an individual, or a business — but it’s the borrowing, not the lending perspective.

We want stories rich in detail because that’s where the opportunity lies for us to learn how we might make the ShareRing platform work best for people like you. You could tell us what the experience was like and things that surprised, delighted or frustrated the borrower in the story.

We want written text between 150–500 words. We welcome photos with the text that you think will enrich our understanding of what was going on.

Please be sure to get the permission of any individual you name or photograph in your scenario. Change their name if they don’t wish to be identified.

Below is a sample scenario-story, so you can see what we are looking for. [1]

How it works:

We are going to select the 5 best scenarios and reward the ‘author’ with a special ShareRing swag (t’shirt, cap, and some other surprise stuff), plus you’ll get bragging rights for your community spirit and influence on ShareRing.

Selection of the 5-best will be made by a panel of Rohan Le Page , COO; Helen Palmer, Global Community Director; and Chelsea Rustrum, Sharing Economy Advisor. The panel’s decision will be final, and they’ll be selecting based on a) richness of detail and b) uniqueness of scenario.

When you submit your story — and you can submit as many as you like — we’ll collect extra data to help us classify the stories. Basically we want to know: was this a at-home scenario, a at-work scenario or a travelling-scenario.

You’ll be acknowledged as the author, and you give us permission to use your story in our product development and marketing activities.

The deadline for submissions is Sunday 5 August, 2018, 12:00am AEST. Submit your scenario-stories here.