Hi, I’m opening this thread to discuss the experimentations around mapping resources with open knowledge currently ongoing at Mouans Sartoux through the Inventaire project.
If you are not familiar with the project
In two words, inventaire.io a libre web application allowing you to do the inventory of your books to let your friends or the world know which books you can share, give or sell: with several people doing so, it’s forming a sort of distributed library. The long term motivation is to go toward an economy where economic agents (peers, businesses, or public instituations) publish their resources, and possibly their associated transactions mode (giving, sharing, selling…) the linked-open-data-way, letting citizen aggregate those offers with their algorithms and interfaces of choice, not the one designed and controlled by a business. For Open Source Circular Economy to happen, it need to be embedded in the tools we use to relate to resources and it can’t happen if we let businesses do the tools, the interfaces. Businesses and tools to handle information on resources need to be decoupled, and those interfaces’ code and data should be opened. What I’m trying to do through Inventaire is a step in this direction, an example of what value there is in going this way: showing that we can browse and discover the beautiful pieces of culture that are the books and find ways to get access to them, in a free or classic economy way, through an interfaces that values open knowledge, erudition, serendipity and other intellectual and social pleasures over culture consumerism and push marketing. What could be an Amazon built with the culture of Wikipedia?
For more, I invite you to read Inventaire’s welcome page, then on the more theoretical side you can either read the discussion with had in the fb group on how my works on P2P resources management relate to Lars’ ones on IPO or you can go straight to the article on P2P Resources Management (subtitled: or how we could turn our transactional data in one of the most powerful tools for change)
Experiences during the OSCE days at Mouans-Sartoux
Objective: map books related to the Circular Economy and related subjects with Inventaire
Roadmap:
- start from the city library (la Mediathèque) to see what are the existing ways people get access to the library inventory: the best would be a Linked Open Data endpoint or an API making the inventory database queriable from the open web. It’s probably not the case [to be confirmed soon after we discuss it with the library staff], so the favorite solution for the moment is to create a normal inventaire.io account for the library on and just start scanning relevant books barcode, then see how it works for them: what is missing in the current app, what seems hard or inadapted to their use.
- next would be to get other actors of the city -associations or citizens interested in ecology- to do their part of the distributed library
Let’s see how that goes!
Any question very welcome. The project needs more loving parents and occasional contributors. you can find the code is public and AGPL licensed, the project roadmap is waiting for your inputs, the transifex would love to hear from your language (just don’t rush on doing the German version as someone already started that from github, we just need to put it online properly and sync back with transifex)