Call for Interest: IndieWebCamp pop up session on Goodreads replacements and decentralized book projects

Based on some recent discussions with a variety of people I’m helping to organize an IndieWebCamp pop-up session on personal libraries online. If you’ve ever considered how to own all your own Goodreads-like reading data and still interact with others or you’ve got an website, product, or application that attempts to do this, this is sure to be your cup of tea (or maybe we should say “favorite genre”).

If you’re interested, comment or reply to this post, or add your interest and preferred dates to the IndieWeb wiki.

Date: Sometime in February 2022

Time: TBD (approximately 3 hours in duration)

Streaming video/audio platform: Zoom

Hashtag for the session: #DistributedLibraries

We’ll focus discussion on personal libraries on one’s site(s) and how they can interact with each other. How can we pool data and resources for the common good? How can we provide Goodreads like functionality in a decentralized manner? What pieces are we missing? How can we add them? Are there any easy ways we can standardize the pieces for better site-to-site interoperability? How can we interoperate with other projects like Mastodon and BookWyrm or data sources like Open Library?

Organizationally, depending on attendees and needs we may break our time up into two or three facilitated sub-sessions to focus on and cover specific topics of interest. If you have an idea for a sub-session topic (we’ll operate Bar-Camp style the day of the event) you’d like to see or facilitate please indicate it below.

If you’d like to help facilitate the session or volunteer in running it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Want to start discussing the topic prior to the session? Feel free to meet up online in the IndieWeb chat.

We’ll try to announce a date around mid-January to provide time for people to reserve the time.