Civilizational Infrastructure
For Democratic Cooperation
A federated compute, resource, and governance protocol designed for cooperatives, communities, and federations. Building programmable, governable, and resilient digital commons infrastructure.
Beyond Web3: Cooperative Infrastructure
ICN isn't just another blockchain or crypto project. It's programmable infrastructure for cooperatives, communities, and federations to govern themselves democratically, coordinate economically, and replace extractive systems with cooperative ownership.
Cooperative Contract Language (CCL)
Program your bylaws, policies, and governance rules as executable code. CCL contracts replace statutes with transparent, verifiable, and democratic decision-making that scales from housing cooperatives to global federations.
Cooperative Economics Engine
Built-in mutual credit, time banking, local currencies, and profit-sharing. Mana prevents speculation while enabling fair resource allocation across cooperative networks and mutual aid systems.
Federated Governance
Autonomous cooperatives maintain sovereignty while participating in larger federations. Democratic decision-making with liquid delegation that scales from local worker coops to global climate action networks.
Verifiable Everything
Every governance decision, economic transaction, and cooperative action creates cryptographic receipts anchored in a content-addressable DAG. Full transparency without blockchain energy waste.
Cooperative Identity & Trust
Self-sovereign identity enables participation across multiple cooperatives and federations. Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving membership verification and reputation tracking.
Mesh Compute Cooperation
Share computing resources democratically across cooperatives. WASM-sandboxed job execution with reputation-based assignment for everything from data processing to AI model training.
What Cooperatives Can Build
ICN provides the infrastructure for cooperatives to program their own governance, manage their economics democratically, and coordinate across federations. Here's what becomes possible.
Housing Cooperatives
Program rent control policies, maintenance coordination, democratic tenant decision-making, and conflict resolution. CCL contracts encode housing cooperative bylaws with automatic execution.
Examples:
- • Rent stabilization algorithms
- • Maintenance request workflows
- • Tenant voting on improvements
- • Anti-speculation enforcement
Worker Cooperatives
Democratic workplace governance with programmable profit-sharing, labor coordination, and workplace justice. Transparent decision-making from daily operations to strategic planning.
Examples:
- • Profit distribution algorithms
- • Democratic work scheduling
- • Workplace conflict mediation
- • Skills-based job assignment
Cooperative Banking
Mutual credit systems, community currencies, time banking, and cooperative loans. Enable local economic self-determination with built-in risk management and democratic oversight.
Examples:
- • Local currency issuance
- • Mutual credit clearing
- • Time bank exchanges
- • Democratic loan approval
Mutual Aid Networks
Coordinate emergency response, resource sharing, and community care. Match needs with resources across neighborhoods and regions with transparent distribution algorithms.
Examples:
- • Emergency resource allocation
- • Skill sharing networks
- • Community care coordination
- • Disaster response planning
Supply Chain Cooperatives
Democratic purchasing, quality assurance, and supply chain transparency. Coordinate bulk buying, ethical sourcing, and cooperative ownership of supply chains.
Examples:
- • Bulk purchasing coordination
- • Supplier evaluation systems
- • Quality assurance protocols
- • Fair trade verification
Community Governance
Participatory budgeting, community land trusts, and civic decision-making. Replace municipal bureaucracy with transparent, democratic, and accountable governance systems.
Examples:
- • Participatory budgeting
- • Community land management
- • Local resource allocation
- • Civic project coordination
Revolution as Design Problem
ICN treats systemic transformation as an infrastructure challenge. We're not just building software—we're architecting the foundations for a cooperative, democratic, and regenerative civilization.
What ICN Replaces
- ❌ Corporate platforms with cooperative apps
- ❌ Bureaucratic governance with programmable democracy
- ❌ Extractive finance with cooperative banking
- ❌ Isolated cooperatives with federated networks
What ICN Enables
- ✅ Programmable governance with CCL contracts
- ✅ Cooperative economics with mana and mutual credit
- ✅ Democratic decision-making at any scale
- ✅ Transparent, verifiable, and accountable systems
Cooperatives, Communities & Federations
ICN recognizes three distinct but interoperable organizational forms, each with their own governance patterns and economic relationships, all programmable through CCL contracts.
Cooperatives: Economic Engines
Independent economic entities that run their own governance contracts, define decision-making via CCL, and handle production, labor, and services. They operate democratically by their members and can participate in federations for coordination and mutual aid.
Communities: Governance Bodies
Civic-focused entities like neighborhoods, towns, or bioregions that run constitutional governance contracts, manage public goods, coordinate mutual aid, and facilitate democratic participation through verified membership.
Federations: Coordination Networks
Networks that link cooperatives and communities using shared CCL contracts, enable resource sharing, facilitate conflict resolution, and coordinate large-scale actions like climate response or economic mutual aid.
Core Architecture: Consciousness Infrastructure
Cooperative Contract Language (CCL)
A deterministic programming language for encoding legal contracts, governance bylaws, and economic rules. CCL contracts are legally binding, cryptographically verifiable, and executable across federated nodes. Complete 1,200+ line specification with WASM compilation.
Federated Governance
Proposals, voting, delegation, and policy execution with liquid democracy support. Democratic decision-making that scales from housing cooperatives to global climate action federations with transparent audit trails.
Cooperative Economics
Mana for computational access, mutual credit systems, time banking, local currencies, and profit-sharing algorithms. Built-in economic primitives that prevent speculation while enabling cooperative coordination.
Mesh Computing Network
Distributed job execution with reputation-based assignment and WASM sandboxing. Cooperatives can share computing resources democratically for data processing, AI training, and collaborative work across the federation.
Post-State Infrastructure
ICN recognizes that infrastructure is ideology made manifest. Every protocol decision embodies values about how power should be distributed, how decisions should be made, and how value should flow. We're building infrastructure for a cooperative future.
What's Working Now
ICN is 77% complete with working systems cooperatives can experiment with today. These are active development systems building toward revolutionary infrastructure.
Multi-Node P2P Federation
Real libp2p networking with automatic peer discovery and federation bootstrap. Tested with 3+ node networks in development.
Cross-Node Job Execution
Complete mesh job pipeline with bidding, executor selection, WASM execution, and cryptographic receipts across federated nodes.
Democratic Governance Engine
Proposal creation, voting mechanisms, CCL compilation, and policy execution with complete audit trails and democratic participation.
Economic Management System
Mana allocation, regeneration, resource accounting, and policy enforcement across multiple storage backends with reputation integration.
Cooperative Contract Language (CCL)
Programming language for governance, economics, and federation rules. Complete 1,200+ line specification with grammar and standard library in development.
Comprehensive API Ecosystem
60+ HTTP endpoints, TypeScript SDK, authentication, monitoring, and cross-platform frontend applications in active development.
Guiding Principles
Cooperative Sovereignty
Every cooperative, community, and federation maintains full sovereignty over their governance, economics, and decision-making while participating in larger federated networks.
Programmable Democracy
Governance rules are encoded in CCL contracts—transparent, versioned, and executable code that enables democratic evolution of cooperative policies and bylaws.
Regenerative Economics
Economic systems designed for cooperation, not extraction. Mutual credit, time banking, and profit-sharing algorithms that strengthen communities and cooperative networks.
Restorative Justice
Conflict resolution through programmable mediation and community-driven healing processes. Democratic accountability that prioritizes restoration over punishment.
Federation Networks
Cooperatives coordinate through federated networks for resource sharing, mutual aid, and large-scale action while maintaining local autonomy and democratic control.
Cooperative Ownership
Infrastructure owned and controlled by the cooperatives that use it. Democratic governance of the platform itself through federated decision-making.
The "Debugging Civilization" Framework
ICN emerges from a comprehensive critique of extractive capitalist systems and offers cooperative infrastructure as the regenerative alternative. This philosophy is explored in depth through the "Debugging Civilization" essay series.
"Revolution is a design problem solvable through participatory, federated infrastructure rooted in dignity and regeneration."
The core insight that systemic transformation requires not just critique, but the actual construction of alternative systems that embody cooperative values.
Build the Cooperative Future
Join cooperatives, communities, and federations building post-capitalist infrastructure. Program your governance, democratize your economics, and own the systems that shape your world.