At a preliminary meeting for the Auckland Library Of Things on Tuesday the 10th of June, we talked about the following points:
1. There will be weekly community get-togethers to talk about the Library:
Tuesdays, 6pm at Tangle Ball, 27 Edinburgh Street, Newton. All are welcome

2. There is a simple website, at the moment it’s on Robin’s domain, at some point we will get a domain like www.alot.org.nz

Funding from tangle ball to buy the domain name was suggested: it would be $20 per year.

3. Does anyone have any items which they would like to make available to the library? The first items have been put in. See:
http://bumblepuppy.org/alot/?page_id=40
Let us know at following get-togethers if there are further things you wish to add. Robin will also put together a password-protected page with member contact details, which only other members can see.

4. Robin is looking at various pieces of software to do the tracking of items in a simple, decentralised way. This is going to take some time, so Ed suggested we start right now, doing things in a manual way. This is the draft process we put together:
a. The website holds a list of items available through the library, and the name of the owner of that item (or the person who cares for it, in the case it has been donated to the library). For the time being, Robin will maintain and publish this list, later on it will be maintained by all members.
b. If anyone wants to use an item, they contact the owner/carer and arrange to borrow it. The borrower may (if the owner/carer allows) then pass it on to another person when they are done with it, but the owner/carer must be told who it has gone to.
c. In the case the owner/carer does not hold the item at any particular time, they know who has it, and can arrange for loan to someone else.

5. The software packages Robin is looking at to manage the tracking and loaning of items are written in python and ruby on rails, join in at the link below or let him know if you have any knowledge there and want to assist modifying them for our purposes:

https://github.com/robinpaulson/distlib

https://github.com/medwards/free-library-on-rails/

Translators would also be appreciated, we would like the site to be available in Māori as soon as possible, later in other languages.

6. None of this is fixed, please comment on anything, make suggestions, come along next Tuesday June the 17th at 6pm.