High Desert Institute

The Library

The Library

The Library is HDI’s promise to publish everything we learn about thriving off-grid—permaculture field notes, schematics, course materials, survival manuals, zines, and oral histories. Each outpost hosts a full copy on low-power hardware, shares it over local Wi-Fi, and syncs updates through the Cyberpony Express mesh. Because it is 100% free and open-source, any community can fork it, add localized knowledge, and send improvements back upstream.

What lives inside

• Core curriculum – gardening, water, energy, shelter, governance, finance, mutual aid.
• Workshop recordings and slides – so every cohort can revisit trainings on demand.
• Community-contributed playbooks – everything from building cob domes to running cooperatives.
• Emergency references – first aid, wildfire response, evacuation checklists, and comms plans.

Hardware profile

• Raspberry Pi or similar mini PC with SSD/microSD mirror of the Library.
• Local Wi-Fi or ethernet to serve the collection via kiosks, tablets, or laptops.
• Optional Meshtastic bridge for syncing metadata and ferrying small files over the mesh.

Software stack

• HDI Librarian for retrieval-augmented Q&A against the collection.
• Open-source doc viewers (Kiwix, Calibre-web, Nextcloud) for browsing and syncing.
• Git + rsync/IPFS pipelines for publishing updates back to HQ.

How to contribute

1. Document your experiments, measurements, and lessons learned.
2. License them under permissive or Creative Commons terms.
3. Submit pull requests (or email archives) so the Lorekeepers can ingest and tag the new material.

Roadmap

• Finish ingesting all historical HDI build logs and workshop decks.
• Bundle “starter library” images for each outpost, sized for common SD cards.
• Publish a public mirror plus instructions for running your own inside a LAN-only environment.
• Integrate translation workflows so communities can localize and re-share content in their own languages.

← Back to Lorekeepers’ Guild