Community Distributed Library

Your street already owns everything you need.

Someone on your street already owns the ladder, the tent or the book you need. One shared shelf brings everything within reach, lent between people who live nearby.

How it works

A bench by a garden gate on a quiet terraced street, holding paperbacks, a board game, a tent and a drill, a stepladder beside it

Things worth owning together

A wooden shelf of paperbacks by a window, one with a bookmark bearing the library's mark, a trailing plant at one end

Books

The novel you finished last month is somebody's next read.

Tools

A drill spends most of its life in a drawer. Let it work.

Board games

Game night without buying another box that fits nowhere.

A small tent by a misty lake at sunrise, with two different camping chairs, a stove and kettle, a lantern, a cool box and a sleeping mat

Camping gear

A tent for the one weekend a year you actually use it.

Ask, meet, hand over, bring back

  1. List what you are happy to lend

    Add anything else with a name, photo, description and tags. It stays on your shelf until somebody asks.

  2. Ask a neighbour

    Browse what is near you, ask for it, and talk it through in a thread. No money changes hands.

  3. Meet and hand it over

    Pick a time both your calendars allow, meet, and confirm with a code. Bringing it back works the same way.

A sunny row of terraced houses, each a little different, with a stepladder, a rolled tent and a lawnmower waiting on the doorsteps

Fewer things bought. More neighbours known.

Community

Every loan is a doorstep conversation. A library of a few hundred people is small enough that faces become names, and names become the people you call when the boiler goes.

Sustainability

The greenest product is the one nobody had to make. A street that shares its tools and tents buys less, throws away less, and keeps what it has in use.

Built for people who live near each other

A look inside

It runs in the browser of the phone you already have, with no app store in between. Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app, with its own icon, and tells you when someone asks for something or answers you. If you have not opened it within five minutes, or have notifications turned off, the same news arrives by email, so nothing slips past.

These are the screens of a library of things, from finding a sewing machine to handing over a badminton set.

A phone propped against a mug of tea, its home screen showing the library installed as an app called The Shed, among the usual apps
  1. The library's front page on a phone: a search box, category chips and a grid of photos, a sewing machine, a board game and two bikes, each marked available with its owner and distance

    Browse what is near

    Photos, how far away each one is, and what is free right now.

  2. A sewing machine's page: its owner 700 metres away, its brand and condition, a Borrow button and a map of the area

    Ask for it

    See who has it and roughly where, then ask, with a note for the owner if you like.

  3. The Loans page, with a request for a badminton set waiting for an answer and buttons to accept or decline it

    Hear back

    The owner finds the request under Loans and says yes or no.

  4. A grid of the next two weeks in mornings, afternoons and evenings, with the slots both neighbours are free shaded green

    Pick a time

    Both calendars side by side: the green slots suit you both.

  5. The loan's page with two friendly messages settling seven o'clock, the handoff agreed for Tuesday evening, a six-letter handoff code and a button to mark it handed over

    Meet and confirm

    At the door the owner reads out a code, and the borrower types it in.

Everyone welcome

There are no ratings here, no reviews and no stars, for items or for people. That is on purpose. A library like this runs on trust between neighbours, and every loan is already a kindness.

Looked after by neighbours

Every library can have as many moderators as it needs: neighbours who lend it a little of their time. Most days there is nothing for them to do. They are there for the days when there is.

Ask your assistant for anything

Every library comes with its own MCP server. Connect Claude, ChatGPT or any assistant that speaks MCP, sign in once, and then do everything in your own words. No forms, no menus.

Its pages speak WebMCP too, so an agent built into your browser can do the same while you are signed in, with nothing to connect.

How to connect one

Start one for your street

The software is open source and in the public domain. Anyone can run a library for their own neighbourhood, on their own address, with nobody in between. It runs on a Cloudflare account on the Workers Paid plan (US$5 a month), which covers its email too: nothing else to sign up for.

It is one project that runs any number of libraries, of books or of things. Each library is its own small deployment, with its own members, its own data and its own rules, and no central service that could close, sell or change it. Use it, change it, share it: the code is yours without asking. Ideas, fixes and translations are welcome on GitHub.

Watch how (1 min) See the code Read the guide