Community guides
Store practical instructions, onboarding guides, operating notes, local procedures, and how-to material.
Relay Library
Community knowledge should survive disruption.
Relay Library is the future RelayHub knowledge and memory layer for community guides, maps, procedures, training material, meeting records, emergency plans, recovery information, local history, and cultural continuity.
Purpose
Knowledge is community infrastructure.
Communities need more than chat. They need memory, procedures, maps, guides, decisions, lessons learned, cultural records, and recovery instructions that remain available when ordinary systems fail.
Local knowledge
Preserve maps, supplier notes, repair knowledge, growing notes, field observations, and useful local memory.
Emergency plans
Keep checklists, contact procedures, resource plans, fallback instructions, and recovery playbooks available locally.
Training material
Publish lessons, workshops, skill notes, manuals, learning paths, and community education material.
Meeting records
Preserve decisions, proposals, minutes, notices, agreements, working-group notes, and governance history.
Cultural memory
Protect stories, traditions, events, milestones, local history, language, ceremonies, and shared identity.
Principles
A library is not just file storage.
Relay Library should preserve useful community knowledge while keeping ownership, access, trust, privacy, recovery, retention, and federation explicit.
Knowledge is infrastructure
A community that loses its knowledge loses capability. Relay Library treats knowledge as something to preserve, recover, and hand forward.
Local-first access
Important material should remain available locally where practical, even when internet, cloud services, or federation links fail.
Community-owned memory
Communities should decide what is public, private, shared, archived, deleted, restricted, or federated.
Recovery-first records
Critical guides, governance records, recovery steps, and continuity documents should have realistic backup and restore paths.
Plain-language usefulness
Relay Library should serve ordinary people under real conditions, not become a technical archive only experts can use.
Federation by consent
Communities may share selected knowledge with others without surrendering control over their own library.
What it can hold
Practical knowledge for real communities.
Relay Library should begin with the material communities already need: guides, maps, procedures, decisions, recovery steps, training material, and local memory.
Example knowledge types
Guides
Maps
Procedures
Emergency plans
Training notes
Meeting records
Local history
Supplier notes
Repair notes
Cultural records
Governance records
Recovery playbooks
Knowledge lifecycle
Create, organise, preserve, recover, and share.
Relay Library should treat knowledge as a living community asset. Some material changes often. Some must be archived. Some must be restricted. Some must be easy to recover under stress.
Create
Members, stewards, operators, and working groups create useful knowledge from real community activity.
Organise
Material is grouped into guides, records, plans, maps, procedures, decisions, and local reference collections.
Preserve
Important knowledge is retained, backed up, versioned where needed, and protected from accidental loss.
Recover
Communities can restore critical records, operating knowledge, identity notes, and recovery instructions.
Share
Selected material may be shared with trusted communities, federations, or public visitors where policy allows.
Local-first memory
Important knowledge should not vanish when connectivity fails.
Relay Library should keep essential material available locally wherever practical. Internet access, remote sync, federation, or hosted services may improve the experience, but they should not become hidden dependencies for critical community knowledge.
Offline access
Key guides, recovery steps, procedures, and plans should remain reachable from the local node where supported.
Degraded operation
If sync or federation fails, the system should explain what is still available locally and what is temporarily unavailable.
Export paths
Communities should be able to export selected knowledge for backup, migration, printing, support, or disconnected sharing.
Governance
Communities decide what is remembered.
A library needs rules. Communities should decide who may create, edit, review, archive, restrict, delete, export, or federate knowledge. Sensitive material requires careful access, retention, and recovery policy.
Access
Material may be public, member-only, steward-only, operator-only, federation-shared, archived, or recovery-restricted.
Retention
Communities should define what is kept, rotated, expired, archived, deleted, or preserved for long-term continuity.
Review
Important material should be reviewed, corrected, superseded, or marked outdated rather than silently trusted forever.
Community roles
Knowledge needs stewards, not just storage.
Relay Library should support clear responsibilities for contributors, editors, reviewers, operators, community stewards, and recovery contacts.
Contributors
Members who create guides, notes, maps, procedures, local knowledge, event records, or training material.
Stewards
Trusted people who maintain structure, quality, continuity, cultural context, and long-term usefulness.
Operators
People responsible for backups, recovery, export, migration, validation, storage limits, and safe operation.
Federated knowledge
Share knowledge without surrendering control.
Communities may choose to share selected guides, maps, procedures, notices, public records, or training material with trusted neighbouring communities. Federation should be voluntary, limited, reviewable, and revocable.
Local library
Knowledge visible only inside a household, group, or community.
Shared collections
Selected public guides, procedures, maps, or training records shared under explicit federation rules.
Revocable federation
Communities should be able to stop sharing, narrow sharing, or change visibility without losing local access.
Hard boundaries
What Relay Library should not pretend to do.
Preservation claims must be honest. Knowledge systems need backup, recovery, access control, retention, and validation before they can be trusted with serious community memory.
Relay Library should not make private community knowledge public without explicit policy and consent.
Relay Library should not treat every record as permanent; retention and deletion must be governed.
Relay Library should not replace community judgement, elders, stewards, or living culture.
Relay Library should not depend on cloud access for basic local knowledge retrieval.
Relay Library should not expose recovery material, identities, or sensitive records casually.
Relay Library should not claim preservation unless backup, restore, and validation paths exist.
Roadmap
Build the library from useful local knowledge outward.
Relay Library should begin as simple, useful, local-first community knowledge. It should only expand into richer sharing, federation, and long-term archival claims after recovery, governance, and validation are proven.
Concept
Define library scope, document types, access levels, retention rules, recovery requirements, and federation boundaries.
Local library
Support a simple local knowledge base for one household, group, or community.
Community roles
Add stewards, editors, contributors, reviewers, moderators, and recovery contacts.
Recovery and export
Validate backups, restore, support export, redaction, offline access, and version history.
Federated knowledge
Allow selected guides, maps, procedures, or public records to be shared with trusted communities.
Early interest
Help shape community memory infrastructure.
Relay Library should be shaped by households, local groups, rural communities, event organisers, educators, makers, operators, stewards, and communities that need practical knowledge to endure.
Interested in Relay Library?
Register interest if you want to test community guides, local knowledge bases, recovery records, training material, offline access, or federated knowledge sharing as RelayHub develops.