On designing Shareish, an open-source, map-based, web platform to facilitate diverse solidarity practices

We present the Shareish web platform to foster diverse solidarity practices inspired by concepts of the gift economy. Its design is grounded in prior work (in CSCW and solidarity HCI), and in new qualitative research involving participants engaged in solidarity practices. Shareish aims at leveraging community assets through donations, free loans, requests of goods and services, free event announcements, and by enhancing the visibility of freely available resources. On a Shareish instance, users have the ability to view localized items on a map or in lists, utilize search filters, contribute new content with detailed textual and visual descriptions, engage in discussions with other users, and receive notifications when new content is added in their neighborhood. The platform can be replicated and improved by communities seeking autonomy as its source code is distributed freely under a permissive open source license (https://github.com/shareish). A research demonstration server is available (https://shareish.org).