Tinbot Transport · Draft #1
The "Open Source Amazon" — In Plain English
A neighborhood logistics network for reusable hardware. Like a Little Free Library, but for broken laptops, old phones, and spare parts — connected by neighbors, repair cafés, and one occasional freight leg.
Little Free Library meets UberEats meets Boost Mobile. We piggyback infrastructure that already exists.
What problem are we actually solving?
Working electronics get thrown away because getting them to someone who can use them is harder than throwing them out. Charities and repair cafés have intake pipelines, but the gap between "I have a box of stuff" and "I know where to drop it" is the friction that kills the chain.
Tinbot is the transport layer that closes that gap — without building a new app, a new identity system, or a new warehouse.
Three node tiers, only three
- T1 — Dropoff. Your front porch, a library counter, a coffee shop shelf. No staff. A box with a label.
- T2 — Hub. A repair café, a school workshop, a maker space. Hands-on triage, wipe, label, route.
- T3 — Freight. An LTL carrier or mutual-aid van. Only when local demand is met. A single pallet, not a fleet.
90Day pilot
1County, Florida
0Custom apps
≤12Volunteers
The five rules we will not bend
- Try before you ship. Local first, freight second. A 48-hour window before anything leaves the cluster.
- Tinbot accepts hardware, not data. Every box gets wiped at intake. The line is in writing before the first box arrives.
- Chain-of-custody is public, append-only. No names. Just dates, node IDs, and box counts. Readable by anyone.
- The box is boring. Sealed, labeled, photographed at handoff. Dispute starts with a photo, not a story.
- Volunteers carry boxes, not liability. The network publishes what was on the box at handoff. Carriers are not responsible for donor data.
Why this is draft #1, not "launch"
Because the network hasn't run yet. The SOP is the map of where we're trying to go. The pilot is the GPS — and the GPS doesn't switch on until there's a schoolhouse, a stack of totes, and a council of five people willing to say "yes, run it for 90 days."
Where the pilot would happen: Corinth / Walton County, FL. Existing schoolhouse host site with a repair bench, a community relationship, and a real mix of rural + small-town last-mile. Solar Link already works out of the same workshop.
What we are NOT claiming in this canon
This draft does NOT say:
- That the cognitive / gholing framings in the source seeds are how the pilot will be run.
- That privacy-preserving telemetry or executor-loop routing is year-one work.
- That a custom backend, custom identity layer, or cross-state freight network exists yet.
- That any decision has been ratified by TLIP Void, branch leads, or partner orgs.
What happens next
One volunteer coordinator. One wipe-protocol lead. One ledger steward. The SOP laid out in §1–§16. A 90-day run. A public write-up at the end. If it works in one county, it can be copied to the next one — slowly, like a Little Free Library showing up on a different street corner.
Read the full 16-section SOP →