Community Garage Sale

Our town holds a Community Garage Sale every May, coordinated by the town's excellent Community Services Director, Regina Falkner, and the volunteer Community Services Commission. When I was first appointed to that commission, I assumed that the event was some sort of communal swap meet on town property. I have since learned that I'm not alone in that initial assumption, but it is wrong nonetheless.

What it is is a single day when everyone is encouraged to have a garage sale and to register their intentions with the town. The town gives sellers a kit of literature--a nice letter, selling tips, and a piece on valuing things for the IRS--and it prints a few thousand maps to the garage sales for buyers. The maps are printed on newsprint and include a table of addresses with an attempt at classification, such as "toys," "baby things," and so forth. There are usually 50 or 60 sales, so the map gets crowded.

The town has a nice website by CivicPlus, and I can't remember if they post a PDF there. But the town pays for an ad in the local weekly dead-tree newspaper to advertise the event. Costs for the town's involvement is about $6,000. We learned this because this year the event has been canceled, "for now." [Note, the 'canceled' link is to a San Jose Mercury News story, which means the link will break at some point in the future.]

Town staff--folks like energetic Volunteer Coordinator Monica Renn--enter garage sale registration information into a spreadsheet, presumably, to produce the table listing. I'm not sure how the map is done, but the town has an impressive geographic information system (GIS) and has cadastral maps of every parcel in town available online. I would bet money that the $6,000 budget for the event is simply what they pay to print the newsprint maps and what they pay for the newspaper advertisement.

I have belabored this point because it is typical of the last-century thinking that is in the process of changing. First, the town thinks it needs to be involved "coordinating" something that will coordinate itself. Second, although the town went out of its way to avoid any mention of or support for the online-only Los Gatos Observer, the annual garage sale ad represents a "gimme" to the weekly newspaper and the printer. They won't be happy at this loss of revenue--look for an editorial opposing some other town "event" in the near future.

But is this the most efficient way to do this? Of course not, and--short of legally restricting each household's sale items--it is probably the least efficient mechanism possible. We settle on one, arbitrary day, for the convenience of the organizers. The town tries to hand out the printed maps--stacks are left at the library and town offices--but most buyers just follow the (illegal) signs on telephone poles. Of course, there is no way to advertise specific items, so vague hints like "toys" are all a buyer gets.

There are garage sales here every weekend, just like everywhere else. The town's kit of information for sellers is a drop in the ocean of information available on the web. (Google returns 25 million links for "garage sale tips.")For buyers, following the signs works on any weekend.

The web is already coordinating garage sales, thank you. It's called eBay, craigslist, and Freecycle. Clearly, it's not about spreading your junk on your driveway, it's about trading things you don't need or want anymore for a little money. Most of us have things we'd rather give away than throw away, even if we're not "save the landfill" environmentalists.

But there is a downside to existing web services. You can't sell your lawn mower on eBay, because you don't want to have to ship it somewhere. Craigslist is great, but you have to interact with strangers. I haven't used Freecycle yet--I think it's a cool concept, but Freecycle is about free, non-profit stuff, and some things are worth more than $0.

A good community news site would let neighbors post sales as events with a link to a Google map. I think members of a community should have the ability to post articles, like this blog post, with photographs. So, you should be able to associate an article about your sale that features some of the items you expect to sell. The community news site would be able to produce a map of all garage sale locations for a given date.

This works like the "self-organizing groups" that Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, currently on my nightstand. He explains that the organizational costs of some things of value are just not worth it--Hello? The town needs to save its $6,000?--but that a service can support self-organization. He cites Flickr, where people can share photos and tag them with labels like "Mermaid Parade." And just like that, you and I can find all photographs of the Mermaid Parade, without Flickr or the dozens of photographers doing any "coordinating." It's pretty obvious that's how used stuff should find a good home.