The Shed: Custodianship for Shared Tools

Shared tools have a way of disappearing, breaking, or quietly becoming one person's permanent possession. The Shed exists to keep that from happening — not by adding rules, but by adding visibility.

The five fields per Resource

• Name and category — Tool, Vehicle, Space, Material, Other
• Description — what it is, what it isn't, any quirks ("the chuck slips a bit if you over-tighten")
• Photo — non-negotiable. Three minutes with a phone camera saves hours of "wait, which drill?"
• Custodian — the person responsible for the item's overall care, not for booking it
• Booking calendar — who has it when

Adding something to the Shed

Shed page > + Add Resource. Anyone with the Architect role can add. Be specific. "Drill" is too vague when there are three. "Makita 18V cordless drill (the one with the green case)" tells a future villager exactly what they're looking at.

The Custodian role

Every Resource has one custodian. Their job is small but important: they're the person to ask when something seems off, the one who knows where the spare battery lives, the person who arranges repairs when the welder eats itself. Custodianship doesn't mean ownership — it means "I'm watching this one."

Rotate custodianship at least yearly. The same person being responsible for the same five tools forever creates a soft kind of resentment.

Maintenance flag

If a tool breaks during your booking, mark it Maintenance immediately. Booking is blocked, the custodian gets notified, and a brief note explains what's wrong. The next person who tries to book it sees the flag and can't accidentally take a broken thing into the field.

The opposite of this — silently returning a broken tool — is the single biggest cause of Shed entropy. Don't be that villager. The Maintenance flag is faster than texting the custodian. More on this in The Tragedy of the Commons.

What happens at the end of a booking

The system doesn't auto-prompt for a return-condition check. We've found that adding more workflow makes people use the Shed less. Instead, the convention is simple: if it's the same as you got it, do nothing. If it's worse, flag Maintenance.

For booking specifics

See Booking the Shed: pickup, drop-off, and care. For federated Resources, see Sharing assets: the regional Shed.