Cultural memory, strung by hand.
CultureBlocs is a set of open schemas and small tools for keeping a record of your cultural life — the exhibitions, gigs, films, books and encounters that make it up. Moments are minted as beads, told into strands, and kept in a spine you run yourself. Publishing is a deliberate act, never a default.
Local-first
Beads are minted on your devices and live in your own spine. Nothing needs the network to work; a gallery basement is a fine place to remember something.
Own your data
The record store runs on your machine. Every schema is open, every export is yours, and the tools are small enough to read.
Privacy by default
Everything starts private. Sharing is a promotion you perform on purpose — per bead, per strand — with locations fuzzed and devices stripped on the way out.
How a moment travels
The same schemas describe a bead whether it lives on a device, in your spine, or published to the open web — privacy is a property of where a record lives, not of its shape. That is what makes local-first and federation two ends of one thread rather than two systems.
Start somewhere
Read the schemas
Four small lexicons — beads, annotations, strands, and their shared parts —
published under com.cultureblocs.*.
See the tools
A hardware totem, a browser studio, a record spine, a timeline, and a scrobbler — all small, all yours to run.
Come to the meetup
A London evening for people working across technology, data, creativity and culture. Newcomers welcome.