The Epoch of Sharing is here. This new era is a great time of opportunity for passionate obsessives to collaborate and make wonderful things happen.

But before we get to the current state of affairs, let's look back to a time when the locomotive heralded a new age of industry and the annihilation of time and space.

In the early 1800's very few people travelled farther than a days walk from where they were born. The fastest way to get somewhere was by horse and the fastest means of communication was a carrier pigeon.

By the middle of the 1800's a canal system was in place in England at least and you could transport goods which meant that your town didn't have to be self sufficient. You could have a town that was good at making shoes and other towns could be good at producing jam and so on.

By the end of the 1800's the train had arrived into the world and people who road it felt distances disappear. Before the train, crossing the USA had been a dangerous, life threatening 7 week journey. On a train, it could be done in under a week. With the arrival of fast long distance travel, the industrial revolution began.

At the time people talked about the annihilation of time and space. Because you could get places in less tme, the world shrank and distance wasn't the barrier it had been. People felt the change coming and it was coming on a train. Empires were built on the trains and the industrial revolution arrived. For some, it was a magical time to build wealth, but for most, it was a time full of change that appeared bleak and shifting and it was full of a lot people with hammers hammering railroads and lots of people with saws cutting down trees to be fed into the steam engines.

Just like with the dawn of the industrial revolution, we're arriving at another shifting time in the world. Organizations don't need to giant multi-national corporations to succeed. They need to be flexible, connected, collaborative, and clever to succceed. A culture of sharing is emerging as the most intersting thing going these days. The free culture movement is gaining steam and winning is all about sharing and winning together. By sharing we connect to each other and amazing possibilities are around every corner. Right now, today, we are in a time where we have amazing tools to connect to each other and share and more are on the way. The most interesting thing going on right now is SHARING.

I read the news today and it was dull. I sat out on the stoop with Kio and we read it cover to cover. The whole NYTimes was readable in about half an hour. Sitting on the stoop reading the paper should have been an iconic Brookyn experience, but it left us feeling like we were riding horses in the age of locomotives. There was little or no mention of the Iraq pull out or the North Korea Nuclear Threat which I heard about later in the day from friends. The ability to get information is no longer owned by news institutions. In fact, even though there is a lot of gossip and misinformation out there on the peer to peer news level, I trust my friends as news sources way more than I trust the formerly mainstream media. Again, it's about sharing. The newspapers and tv stations used to have a monopoly on the sharing of information, but that age has gone the way of the carrier pigeon.

Beyond the annihilation of time and space, today's connectivity has gone the next step and made it possible for people to share anything to anywhere. The more passionate you are about something, the smaller the world becomes.

Even though the core MakerBot team is in Brooklyn, we've shipped MakerBots to every continent except Antarctica now and the community is connected with a google group, flickr pool, forum and wiki for developing and sharing information, helping each other out, and pushing development forward. You used to have to use the postal system to get things, but now if you want something and you have a MakerBot, you can design it and start printing it out moments later. If you want to share a design with a friend on the other side of the world, you can just upload it to Thingiverse and in a few moments, your friend with a MakerBot in Berlin can start 3D printing the object. The age of the post office and needing trucks, trains and planes to shift objects is coming to an end. You can share objects digitally over the internet instantly and everywhere there's an internet connection.

I use this as an example because MakerBot is close to my heart and it's my passion to support others in creative endeavors, but it's not just happening with MakerBot Industries. It's happening with every individual and company and community that's connecting and sharing. The bottom line is that if you are supporting people sharing their passions, then you are winning right now. Twitter and facebook and the pirate bay are the some obvious folks facilitating sharing at the core of what they do, but you don't have to have a sharing company to win, you can do a lot of things and support people sharing their obsessive nature and it will work. I know in NYC there is a growing community of startups that are scrappy and full of energy and are happy to share their experiences.

In Germany, the average person is in 3 clubs. In the USA there are very few people who are in any sort of club. Even though I wish more people in the USA connected by meeting physically together in groups, clubs don't really matter that much as a metric because with the internet, if you have a passion, you have a community online that you connect with. It could be a passion for model trains or a obsession with a conspiracy theory, but no matter what the passion is, there is a community to connect with and the farther out it is, the better. With a long tail passion, the community is smaller and you can connect to everyone in the group and make new friendships, connections, and with those connections you can work with them to collaborate and make wonderful things happen that you couldn't do by just yourself.

For me, NYCResistor is my club. Our goal is to learn, share, and make things and as a community, we have so many skills to share that it's off the charts. Besides the members who have keys to the hackerspace, we have a greater community in our Microcontroller Study Group which has around 1000 members who all share information and collaborate on electronics projects and more. Meeting together in the space is a powerful way to build trust, but our sharing over the internet, let's us get to know each other better and support each other in different ways.

The open source and free culture movements are going strong and it's exciting. The tools of collaboration and connection are in everyone's hands. It's a great time to be part of something special that you care about and be working on it collectively with others and sharing the results and wisdom of your experience.

With a culture of sharing, we get things done faster and better. We all work on a piece and get everything in return.

With the rise of the locomotive and the car and airplane, time and space have been annihilated for over a hundred years. Right now we are seeing creativity and passion grow in a time when large corporations are failing. The future will be built by all of us and the culture of sharing that results from our individual and collective efforts.

I'm not saying to quit your job and start an iPhone app company to connect people, although there are lots of people doing that successfully. I'm saying that if you aren't doing something obsessive that connects you to a community in addition to your normal daily grind, then you are giving pony rides while the trains rush past.

I declare that the Epoch of Sharing is here. There are so many ways to get involved and be a part of this exciting time. What are your obsessions?  How are you connecting and collaborating with those that share your passions? I'd love to hear your reactions in the comments.

Image by National Library of NZ