'Tis more blessed to give than to receive, the Bible tells us. To the team behind handmeon.com, a website where "gift ecology" rules, 'tis even more blessed to give, receive, and pass along.
You say: material possession. They say: time share.
"Subversive? Definitely, because it questions our whole relationship to acquiring stuff," says Jeff Doyle, a Web programmer from Norwich, Vt., who helped launch the gift-recycling site three months ago. "Personally I like Christmas," he adds. "But I know a lot of people who feel coerced and frustrated this time of year" by the obligatory nature of gift-giving.
Doyle, 50, and his partners, Dwight Aspinwall, 46, of Hanover, N.H., and Michael Yacavone, 45, of Cornish, N.H., cooked up the idea a year ago, then tinkered with it during what Doyle calls "many beer sessions" before its low-key rollout this past summer.
The idea behind gift ecology is to introduce objects - they can be store-bought, found, or handmade - into an ownership matrix that moves them along from recipient to recipient, accruing history and social networks along the way. The more decorative and distinctive the object, the better.
Handmeon items thus far include original artwork, statuary, an Ovation guitar, garden seeds, a chunk of rock from Mount Washington, a toy dog that raps "Jingle Bells," a brass flamingo, and a votive candle from the Watergate complex in Washington. Everything is given away for free, excluding shipping charges. Ownership is expected to turn over every four to six weeks, although there are no set rules governing time of possession.
Layovers are known as "sojourns." Before a piece goes into circulation, its owner is issued a tag with an ID number and password that he or she affixes to the item. When activated online, the tag opens a URL where the handmeon's odyssey can be charted and its story expanded with the addition of photos, personal reflections, and other materials.
The migratory route of an Irezumi sugar bowl, for instance, began three months ago with an autobiographical posting by potter Sarah Heimann, who made the piece and gave it to Doyle. He passed it on to its current owner, who writes on the site that it reminds her of her grandmother. "I have a great fondness and weakness for sweetness," the owner confesses, promising to keep the bowl just "a little longer" before sending it elsewhere.
In all, around a hundred objects are currently in sojourn mode. Sixty individuals are registered as site members. One writes that she's already had 10 handmeons, although the more typical total seems to be one or two.
Some handmeons are further tagged with the hope they'll be improved upon each time they change hands. These so-called "coral reef" objects include a wall-detecting robot created by Michael Geilich, a New Hampshire-based manager for Tele Atlas, a digital-map company, and part-time musician. He recently gave the robot to Aspinwall, who added colored lights and returned it to Geilich, who then rebuilt the device and passed it along to another friend of his. There it rests, Geilich says, up against an ownership wall it has yet to climb over.
"I'm fascinated by the concept, but I'm a skeptic, too," says Geilich, who admits he's been frustrated by the slow pace at which another handmeon item of his - a CD from a reunion concert by a former rock band of his - has been copied and passed along, as he'd hoped it would be.
Beyond the virtues of recycling gifts without guilt, says Doyle, the goal is to de-emphasize the material worth of these pieces while buffing up their more aesthetic, and even spiritual, values. "The unifying concept," Aspinwall says, "is building conversations around these artifacts. The really interesting dynamic is caring, ecology-minded people meeting and becoming friends through the site."
Handmeon.com is the fourth collaborative venture pairing Doyle and Aspinwall. Their first, Stella, a software program written for the Macintosh computer, debuted in 1985. Aspinwall is also the cofounder of Jetboil, a company that makes portable cooking systems. Yacavone was working as a management consultant before he joined handmeon.com. He and Doyle met in 1999, when they built a Web content-management system together. For the time being, the three partners have elected not to solicit advertisers or venture-capital money to fund the site. In the future, says Aspinwall, a fee might be attached to each handmeon tag, but for now the site is "mostly a labor of love."
Doyle was originally inspired by a South Pacific tribe that practices the Kula ring model of gift exchange. Decorative items such as shell necklaces are offered purely to enhance the giver's social status, not as a quid pro quo. Greatness is in the giving, according to the Kula code. Also, what goes around comes around.
Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace also influenced their thinking, according to Doyle, with at least one important difference. "Their social topology is more like the undergraduate experience," he says, "whereas adults tend to have social networks that are more individual and complex. Our M.O. is more squirrelly than theirs, more like a cafe than a big party."
While any object can potentially become a handmeon, personal objects like (post-divorce) wedding rings are discouraged. Items such as used furniture, clothing, and appliances are mostly unwanted, too, along with other stuff readily found on
"We're not an online town dump," says Aspinwall. Still, says Doyle, they're not about to vet every single item that comes along. "This isn't an extension of our personal space."
Compared to holiday "regifting" parties, where unwanted presents are exchanged in often humorous fashion, handmeon .com is more serious in nature, or so its creators maintain. Phil Cubeta happens to agree. Cubeta, the temporary owner of a handmeon, is a Texas-based blogger who posts on the site www.gift hub.org.
"[Doyle] is an intellectual who's really thinking about what holds society together," Cubeta says. "This is not strictly a lighthearted thing."
But is it truly burden-free? The cost of passing an object along is one potential negative, Cubeta notes. Also, says Geilich, giving away a handmeon "imposes a burden on the person you give it to. And gifts that come with burdens are a mixed blessing."
And what if a sojourn lasts more than, say, a month or two? "Nothing bad has happened that we know of," Aspinwall says. "Our only rule is, don't keep it forever."
Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.
