The Distributed Library Project

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday August 24, 2003 @01:55AM from the just-might-work dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mike Benham of thoughtcrime.org has started a cool project for sharing information and building community in San Francisco. From the website: "Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction." It looks like the software is now available for other cities."

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This system could be exploited by grug0 · 2003-08-24 02:18 · Score: 5, Informative

What's to stop a whole bunch of people giving themselves high ratings and good feedback, and then stealing other people's books?

I suggest they use something like the Advogato trust metric to maintain the integrity of their system. This allows bad "nodes" to be isolated and damage to the system avoided.

I also think that there should be penalties, like at any library, for having overdue books. Get a bad rating from one person is just a slap on the wrist.