[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge Lending Library?

[Sai Emrys]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Brian Molnar <brian.molnar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, you mean a "property-of" sticker. I was talking about the stickers that
> Sai proposed, i.e. stickers that communicate intent of the donor. If the
> books were catalogued and inventoried, then this 'intent' information could
> just as easily be provided within the system.

One of the objections raised when this was last discussed (by Shannon,
IIRC?) was that this sort of centralized tracking would be a) onerous
to maintain and b) privacy-exposing.

The benefit of a sticker/stamp is that they are fire-and-forget. Just
take 10 seconds to add them when received (or donated), and that's it.
Applies to all stuff, not just books (e.g. stuff intended for hack
shelf, tools, ...)

And it means that to see if you can do x with y, you just look at y in
some obvious location (e.g. inside cover?), rather than a db entry on
y. Low tech sometimes has very nice properties. :-P

IMO tracking book locations, checkout status, etc would be neat but I
actually kinda agree that it's likely to require enough maintenance
that the db will get out of sync with reality.

> A property-of sticker is fairly orthogonal, and probably a good idea anyway.

I agree.


Incidentally, as Leif somewhat alludes to, any of these ideas won't
remove the need to have some consensus on what default permissions to
apply to previous donations where the donator doesn't do something.
IMO books should be "ours / borrow me / use me" under my proposed
categories.

- Sai