Hey people, so open-source software for community/ neighborhood resource sharing / mutual aid. Eg tools and machines. What is there? @liaizon #CommunityOrganizing #CommunitySoftware #ResourceSharing #MutualAid
@forteller you might be interested in this as - saw u complaining about the Norwegian app Naboer.
@abekonge can you elaborate on what you mean by this? what sort of actions do you need specific tools for?
@liaizon yeah sure. I’m specifically thinking about software for sharing resources in a local community. So if I need a really big pot, or a hedge trimmer or a spot welding machine, I can look up who has that, contact them and arrange to borrow it. Or if I have tools or machines that I want to share I can use such a platform to share it. So like a distributed tool-library kind of thing, a Craigslist for gift economy or a buy-nothing kind of resource-database.
I know different sort of proprietary and data-surveillance kind of software that does this - but I very specifically do not want to lock these resources and networks in walled gardens. Also many of these apps wants people to make money of each other, like “renting” from each other - and I want to build relations and community, not make markets in even more places. So more like couch surfing - not airbnb, in quality of relations.
I know of swinga.coop - a Swedish platform coop. I don’t think it’s open-source, and I’m not sure it’s usable outside specific areas of Sweden. There is an English app in the Google play store. If anyone knows more about this / I’m all ears.
@abekonge there are lots of people wanting this type of thing and I have talked about it with @mariha and @bhaugen and others a number of times. I think @bonfire has some potential to provide some infrastructure towards mutual aid networks like this. I think a federated or distributed network is a *must* for these types of tools to flourish cause we need to be able to have really niche community oriented tooling but still have a global focus
@abekonge @mariha @bhaugen @bonfire https://openhospitality.network was trying to work on infrastructure for all this but it really needs a new push and more active people to move forward (and I think Solid was the wrong direction)
@liaizon
Apparently one of our demos is still alive. Here you can see a few RDF-related formats:
http://valueflows.pythonanywhere.com/
@bhaugen @liaizon @abekonge @bonfire
[might become longer]
E.g. for books there is the “neighborhood resource sharing” example inventaire.io
You can follow me at @sl007@inventaire.io and when I add a new book to lend, you can ring the bell.
@redaktor is following the inventaire approach.
We even use wikidata as a topic system, so if I need a powerful tool we could say
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q827274
manufactured by
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21029981
We do also have an ActivityVocabulary cache of “well-known-things” like an Atlas (Collection) of 1.4 mio. hierarchical Places, Languages etc. pp. (done for assignment described in the end)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1082 :
We can do by JSON-LD context for direct statements like
.population: 1500
or add qualified statements as `Relationship`-`attachment` like
[a] (`Place`) population [b] (numericValue object from wd) with `startTime` and `endTime` claimedBy etc.
If a thing is not in wikidata you can add it in ActivityPub as [b] …
@mariha
Are you aware of the “Fuck Uber” project (see end)?
1/
@bhaugen @liaizon @abekonge @bonfire @sl007@inventaire.io @mariha
This can add a great search experience as well and you proxy or serve well known things (e.g. wikidata, osm) from cache.
The federation part would need at least 1 other step which is that it needs to be federated to a local (neighborhood) Group Actor so that you can fetch, see or filter what people aid in the area.
This is more a practical thing which the assignment in the end can solve.
Then there is a second cornerstone for phase 2 from the last ActivityPub meetings which @redaktor will support and that is to federate resulting Actions to build workflows, very briefly you can attach self-described Actions but that would go to far. There is a brainstorming.
https://gist.github.com/sebilasse/17e52461d500f4c97f2d34edeb12c2ad
Anyway.
I could describe it in a video meeting, also ping @cpmoser
There are a lot of upcoming opportunities, the public broadcaster I work for (ZDF et al.): https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/public-broadcasters-create-public-spaces-incubator/
and then the “Fuck Uber” project which started by meeting at https://fedi.camp
2/
@bhaugen @liaizon @abekonge @bonfire @sl007@inventaire.io @mariha @redaktor @cpmoser
In Germany several hypercapitalist “transport platforms” are threatening the last cooperatives in the business.
While e.g. an official Taxi has to pay fair, they do not have to (or are forbidden by regional regulations).
This project solves the creation of local nodes by the Taxi, green cab, Bike Courier, Delivery cooperative etc.
They give instances.
Each vehicle gets a raspby for their `Travel` and `.location` etc.
Drivers can e.g. contribute road conditions to (re- to OSM) and especially add local knowledge.
This can overlap in the local Group Actor.
They charge 50cents per drive for app / services.
I can think of Overlaps with OHN too, 2 days ago we gave an intro at Open Transport Meetup and so I could connect in a video meeting and would then also invite Clemens (green cab Hamburg) and the devs as well.
3/3
Hey all, thanks for you contributions to this conversation, and for providing a look into some of what is going on in this space. What I gather from your threads are ... 1/10
EDIT: did not make thread public, doh, redoing now ...
@bhaugen @liaizon @bonfire
@sl007@digitalcourage.social
@sl007@inventaire.io @mariha @redaktor @cpmoser @jowek @notplants @zelf @inventaire
... within resource-sharing there is the example of inventaire.io for sharing books in different ways. 2/10
So are there other examples of existing and practicing open-source/open-data software dedicated to some sort of mutual aid resource sharing? 3/10
Within the hospitality space, there is a lot of history, and interesting things going on with organisation and collectivisation of governance in different ways. 4/10
The hospitality use case (community case?) seems very well established, and while related and interconnected with mutual aid style resource sharing, it's slightly something different (although lots of overlaps could be imagined). 5/10
As mentioned by several of you, there is some nice possibilities with activity pub federation, the value flow system, and there are some building blocks (some of it also with value flows) in the @bonfire project - and while that is an interesting thread to pull if we want to start talking implementation, I think it would be interesting to zoom out, and start with figuring out what kind of community story we're imagining. 6/10
I have ideas of how a mutual aid fediverse thing might work, but I think it would be interesting to map out some collective dreams and desires we could have with such a federated platform. 7/10
It would be cool if the result could be kind of similar to a technical protocol, but instead of being formulated from the point of view of the rules of a technical implementation (and as dry), it could formulated as a community story, from the point of view of our collective dreams and desires for what a federated mutual aid platform could be. A collective utopian design scifi ... 8/10
And specific projects could then be said to implement this "social community dream" or parts thereof - and subthreads of how to implement some of these things within activity pub or other specific technical protocols could spin out and work across several projects or implementation, or sub-implementations. But there would be a common sense of what it is we're trying to accomplish as a multitude of people working in different ways in this space. 9/10