pre-introducing uf-library

part 1: a quick story

i volunteer at a tool library. it's a scrappy project that technically fits the non-profit designation, but has managed to cultivate a do-it-together ethos. there are numerous working groups devoted to tool maintenance, educational workshops, community outreach, developing an on-site print shop, and much more. and we do it all on a pretty slim budget with almost entirely unpaid labor

i also love physical media. i recently had to pack most of my posessions into storage for a short time and was struck by the high percentage of my belongings that are physical media. (yet, i always feel like i'm not looking hard enough for new stuff to read or listen to!) floating out amongst my friends are probably a dozen books -- some of which i've maybe forgotten the location of -- but i've been increasingly feeling that more of them should be circulating. what if i made my little media collection a library for my friends?

part 2: software

there's some foss library software out there :koha ils, evergreen ils, openbiblio (and more.) the only tool or 'thing' oriented software i know of are the foss (unfinished) circulate by the chicago tool library and the closed-source myturn. i'm not interested in critiquing existing software here, except to say that none of the things i've seen support the kind of library i want to become

i want to be a library amongst libraries. i want my friends and communities to add their collections to the library network and to lend and borrow and restore and maintain more than they ever could as individuals lending and borrowing amongst friends. and i don't care about the distinction between traditional media-library *and* library-of-things/tool-library models. i want library as community platform. i want applied library sciences

wait that wasn't about software. that was about human networking. but the software to represent this kind of social technology doesn't yet exist. and i think it should. and i think it should be as lean and easy to deploy and administer as possible

i don't have the capacity to build this vision at this moment, but i think i can build some of it and build the capacity to build more. i'm participating in recurse center hacking retreat and i'm writing about my rc experience. that'll be more focused on the 'building my capacity' piece. a lot of that will be about thinking through stuff that doesn't wind up being ultimately implemented. i'll write more about building library separately. (of course there's going to be a lot of interleaving)

the thing to do before hacking next week is to look at the protocols available. (the working-name 'uf-library' is a contraction of 'usufruct', a social-good-oriented property model (can't be giving things latin names tho), but it could also be 'ur-favorite' or 'user-friendly' (what's friendlier than being engaged in community?))

part 3: dreaming

this is an experiment. and kind of a long-shot one at that. i hope that it inspires similar experiments, regardless of the success of this iteration. (there might even already be a project out there that hit on the same idea, however it appears to be abandoned (and a dao))

if this is interesting to you let's talk about it! otherwise, wish me luck :)