Fedinventory

Fedinventory is a concept for software to create a crowdsourced library of materials and equipment that is available for community use, in a way that minimizes financial/extractive friction for the sake of maximizing reuse/repurposing (in order to minimize discarding, whether for recycling or landfill-disposal).

Side note: While "federation" is not a key aspect of the concept itself, it is a key aspect of how we want to design community software moving forward. We will assume that each instance of the software should support at least a relatively small (<100) number of users, and can share data with other instances in a manner similar to how federated social networks operate (complete with ability to limit access to/from other instances that are deemed problematic).

Summary

The software allows users to:

• enter their personal inventory items into a database
• assign topic tags and semantic data to each item
  • e.g. CPU: make, model, speed; yarn: brand, colorway, material, length; clothing: size, make, design, condition, materials
• assign semantic data to tags
• add text or photos to each item or tag
• track item location in a tree structure
• indicate the status of each item
• request available items from any given user
• track the movement and changing status of items, either while being transported from one user to another or simply when stock is rearranged

Ways to think of this:

• an online store for mostly-free stuff
• a thrift store, but with no central location

Mockup

I've kluged together a system on the HypertWiki which implements a very few of the features I have in mind, and maybe conveys a little bit of what I'd like to see. For example, htwiki:Inventory/LCD011 is the inventory listing for a monitor we're currently not using. The page includes some information about the monitor, some photos, and where it is currently stored. The template it uses for displaying the location also allows showing a listing of items in that location and also puts it in the master inventory list. (Unfortunately, the listings currently only show the inventory code without a description, due to the limitations of MediaWiki).

Note that many of the items listed are just for my own recordkeeping; tagging/displaying items to indicate whether they are available for {giving away / lending out / selling} is another needed feature.

(I could go off into a technical discussion of the various ways to make descriptive listings possible within MediaWiki, as well as other features like searching by item type or characteristics, but the TLDR is that I've become dissatisfied with MediaWiki's basic design and am working on my own framework instead.)