"our library"

The idea is this: there is a website where you go and make a virtual library card. On your virtual library card you have a "rating" determined by others and you have "items available for lending" like books you are willing to lend. Perhaps some of your books are really awesome and rare, so you are only willing to lend them to another library member who has at least a 90 percent rating. Maybe you have stipulations on certain items like, "do not dog ear my pages." Maybe you have stipulations like, "I really don't care about this book. You can add it to your library next with the same note on it."

Maybe some of the things in your "items available for lending" are a lawnmower, and a hammer, and gardening tools. The stipulations on these items might be, "clean before returning" or "use at your own risk and return with a full tank."

The things that I think are most important about this idea are this: it is a FREE virtual library of things we don't each need to individually own, but can borrow from folks in our neighborhood who are willing to lend them. What I think is possibly most important about the idea is that its implementation should be very straight-forward, without a lot of hullabaloo about community and whatnot, because focusing on the goods and each individual library member's ability to care for and return them will cause people with integrity from remarkably different communities with differing views to share a common bond: like a book, or a hammer.

The ultimate goal of this is for a person with a really excellent rating, like 99%, to show up at your door to borrow your prized possession, and you think this person looks about as different from you as humanly possible, and you can barely imagine talking to this person, and you give them your prized possession. And then this person brings the possession back. And you go online and you say, yes you can trust this person. Even if that's all you know about them.