Have you ever built an online community or website but struggled to attract users?
Have you ever built a map or directory but struggled to keep it up to date?
Are you fed up with being forced to recreate your profile on every new site you join?
Richard Bartlett, a co-founder of Loomio, says:
“I spent a decade and a million bucks to conclude the only really critical gap in collective organising software is to synchronise group membership across multiple platforms.”
Murmurations is an open source decentralised data sharing project, which addresses that gap – by providing a simple way for users to own their own data in an interoperable format.
The project has been in constant development since the initial idea back in 2019 and has now evolved considerably. Murmurations now encompasses a standardised protocol of composable fields for interoperable data sharing as well as a range of open source microservices including:
- A highly performant Index and API which keeps track of decentralised Profiles
- An Index Explorer for searching data in the Murmurations Index
- A Profile Generator for creating Murmurations Profiles
- An Index Updater for adding, updating and removing Profiles from the Index
- A Batch importer for registering CSV data of multiple profiles with the Index
- A WordPress Aggregator plugin that fetches and displays data from the network
- A WordPress Node Plugin – for registering WordPress projects with the Index (currently being rewritten)
- Several demonstration maps and directories using the components above
- A Status reporting tool to show the performance of the network
- Docs explaining how all the components can be used
The Murmurations team is now working with members of the Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA) to make Groups, Projects, Opportunities and Events from CTA members that post updates on Hylo, Catalist, or Nestr interoperable, so that changes made on one site are reflected on the other sites – directly addressing what Richard Barlett identifies as “the only really critical gap in collective organising”.
The video below is the recording of the Demos we ran on Tues June 20th covering the tools listed above, and explains how you can leverage the power of Murmurations to support community, directory, network and mapping projects.