"Building a Free Internet of the Future" is a monthly interview series published by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), highlighting the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants.
Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
For this installment, we talked to MaxLath, who dedicates most of his time to developing inventaire.io, a web app that allows you do an inventory of your books to inform your network of which books you can give, share or sell, while contributing to the web of linked open data on resources. For him, citizens empowerment is the mission, libre software and open knowledge is the way.
With inventaire.io you can keep an inventory of your books, share it with your friends and communities, and remember the books you lend or borrow. But there are far more possible uses, challenges and technologies involved.
Inventaire is a French non-profit association. Since 2020 they have received several NGI0 grants, the backlog of which they document in their wiki. Now let's highlight this practical, peer-to-peer based initiative.
What can people do with inventaire.io?
The primary proposition of inventaire.io is to let people make the inventory of their books, and let their friends and communities know what's available for giving, lending or selling. The tool is also more and more used by small libraries run by collectives interested in a specific topic (parentality, feminism, role-playing games, etc.) or a specific language. This inventory feature is powered by a bibliographic database built on top of knowledge commons, in particular Wikidata and Wikipedia.
What is Wikidata? And what is the tie-in with inventory.io?
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited database where people can gather knowledge about the world in the form of structured data. Whereas in a Wikipedia article, we might write "Porto is a city in Portugal" as text to be read by humans, in Wikidata we will link the "Porto" entity (Q33707919) to "city of Portugal" (Q15647906) via the "instance of" (P31) property. This structured data can then be used by programs to display that information in different places, in different languages. The primary goal was to support Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia and the others), but other projects can also make use of the data: we use this database in inventaire.io as the base for our bibliographic database, as it already knows a lot about authors, their works, the subjects of those works, etc. We also extend this database with local entities that are created for the needs of inventaire.io's users. As we use the same data model as Wikidata, those local entities can then be transferred to Wikidata by bibliographic data contributors.
Where did the idea for inventaire.io come from?
The idea for Inventaire progressively emerged between 2011 and 2013 from a desire to experiment on mapping resources with libre software and open knowledge. I was finishing my studies and playing with ideas from people like Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze, on the need to look for alternatives to neoliberal and consumerist nihilism, or Doc Searls and the Cluetrain Manifesto, on what opportunities digital tools offered to reshape vendor/consumer relations. I then got involved in the collaborative consumption movement, which gave me the idea to tweak D. Searls' VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) into P2PRM (Peer-to-Peer Relationship/Resources Management). I turned to the topic of books by accident, but it rapidly appeared like a great object to start experimenting with on P2PRM. That's how; for years, we had the claim on the website that we were "starting with books", though it now appears much harder to generalise than we then were anticipating. The singularity of the book object as a means for telling stories, for emancipation and politicisation, solidified the project's now well-established focus on books, and the people who love and share them.
Recently you brought up an important issue: “Why do we have to pay organisations in the US for standardised access to public library information?” Can you explain this problem?
At the start of the project, the idea was to map all the available books, be it on people's bookshelves, or also in public libraries, or even bookshops. Unfortunately, getting public libraries' data on their available books isn't that easy, or at least we didn't find the right entry door. One of the existing global entry doors is WorldCat: a global catalogue hosted by OCLC, a US foundation. Public libraries around the world pay to appear on WorldCat, and then external services are asked to pay a fee to access this same data: when I reached out back in 2015, I was offered the price of "$1,000 for up to 40,000 API calls per year" [API stands for application programming interface]. I don't know if that's a good price, but I really don't think we should have to pay a service in the US to access public data from European institutions. Since I mentioned this issue, I was informed of the existence of the Catalogue collectif de France, which seems to have some of the desired features for France, but I still haven't found an HTTP API to fetch the data we would need to display that info within Inventaire.
You are a small non-profit organisation. To develop this technology, which also has features other than interoperability with Wikidata, at inventaire.io you have received three NGI0 grants since 2020. What have you learned from these engineering experiments supported by European public funds delivered by a consortium like NGI0?
Experimenting in commons infrastructure, without the backing of a pre-existing established organisation, is hard. To us, building the web we want means building without bombarding users with advertising or selling their data, so we needed to find other sources of revenue, ideally without making those sources of revenue take too much time and focus from what we really want to work on. The first five years of the project would not have been possible without social welfare and a frugal lifestyle, as we were still learning what we were doing as we were going. Even as we got more confident and experienced, the project was just too small to be sustained by crowdfunding, and it would have been hard to sustain a project like this in the long term. So it came as a great relief that we could get NGI0 grants!
I think it's amazing that European public funding can be used to explore non-capitalist solutions: with the current wave of carbo-mascu-fascism delivered directly to your smartphone, be it via Silicon Valley or Chinese infrastructure, I hope this kind of funding will help plant the seeds for more alternatives, more Wikipedias, OpenStreetMap, Fediverse, more libre services and commons infrastructures to emerge, and maybe offer a way out of this rotten, enshittified, dystopic web. It will be hard to do without political support though.
How can an organisation that researches, documents and issues challenges about domination and violence use inventaire.io? Or perhaps install inventaire.io on a server to have its own instance?
A collective that would prefer to not have their library inventory on inventaire.io could self-host an Inventaire instance. As Inventaire is libre software, it had always been technically possible to self-host it, but that would mean losing access to the bibliographic data on Inventaire (all the data on authors, works, publishers not yet transferred to Wikidata). Thank to the developments made during our last NGI0 grant, that self-hosted instance could now re-use and contribute to the Wikidata+Inventaire bibliographic database. More details on that topic can be found on our wiki.
Last but not least, the floor is yours. Is there anything you'd like to say to our readers?
A possible next step for Inventaire would be to split the project in two: on one side, the book sharing app, and on the other side, the bibliographic database. The idea would be to make it clearer that it's a knowledge commons that can be used beyond just the inventories use case: we have already seen book review tools such as BookWyrm reuse the Wikidata+Inventaire bibliographic data. Maybe other use cases could be explored!
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software (FOSS) activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).