Continuing down the thought thread of connecting ecovillages or federated communities into a common tech stack. This time about #libraryeconomy and #librarysocialism, and how communities might be able to request and offer goods and services without the need for monetary exchange, and in a way that kinda follows a library of everything approach to things.

A big thing I see in subverting capitalism, and building new forms of living and organizing, is by decommodifying as much as we can. A great way to do that is to look at meeting people's basic needs, and having a way for people to both ask for something, and give something, without paying money. I guess it comes down to social capital, but I don't really like that term, and it fits better with the term gift economy anyways. In some forms it can be mutual aid, other times it can just be meeting a need when it comes up.

The concrete "how" on doing this might look like timebanks. I really like the software from timebanks.org though it doesn't have a self host option and requires an internet connection. Locally to me https://denton.timebanks.org is a great example where people can offer things, and request things as well. So it can be a very quick way of seeing the needs of people, and trying to meet those needs.

In terms of lending libraries, there isn't anything so far that I found that is free and open source that can handle things well. Most of the FOSS stuff is related to libraries. https://koha-community.org/ is a good example of this. I wish there was a way to have a library of things as well (though I guess with some finessing you could make it work)

I think it would be awesome to have the two combined, in the way that timebanks works, where people can request and offer things, combined with a more concrete way of tracking what has been lent to who.

Different communities could have their own internal sharing sites, on their own internal intranet-networks. But also they can connect, federate or be interoperable with other communities as a whole. So if a request in the community net is there, an offer can be found to meet that need. That way each community maintains their autonomy, while also being well-connected with the world at large and able to help move resources around. It would be great to have something that combines these ideas together in one place to make it alot easier, and also have it free and open source, so anyone can use it.

It's the start of an idea at least. It might be a good place to start for a real world #solarpunk experiment, of federated, interconnected communities that use technology as a way to connect with others, while organizing things horizontally and equitably, while maintaining a balance with the ecosystem by making bioregional+permaculture+indegenous knowledge led ecovillages.