ICN is an open-source attempt to build institutional infrastructure.
Not a product, not a platform, not a blockchain, not a DAO framework. A coherent substrate where identity, standing, authority, governance, policy, economics, federation, execution, and provenance belong to the same system — and where the humans inside cooperatives, communities, and federations can actually live in it.
What kind of project this is
ICN is an open-source software project in active construction, organized around a specific institutional thesis: that cooperatives, communities, and federations need infrastructure that takes their form seriously, and that the layer underneath institutional life — identity, rules, decisions, obligations, execution, proof — should be one coherent substrate rather than seven tools held together by staff discipline.
It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, developed in the open on GitHub, and built by a small group of contributors with institutional knowledge alongside technical depth. It is not a startup. It is not venture-backed. It is not a managed service. The code and the documents that describe it are the work, and the website is part of how we keep them honest.
Principles that guide it
- Institutions, not user groups. A cooperative is not a set of logins. Scopes — members, cooperatives, communities, federations, commons — are first-class entities with their own rules, history, and authority.
- Trust-native, not trustless. Trust is a first-class, measurable, auditable property of the system, not something we try to design away.
- Meaning firewall. Kernel enforcement is structurally separated from domain meaning. Apps interpret institutional concepts; the kernel enforces the constraints that result — and never the other way around.
- Provenance as institutional memory. Every outcome traces back through the rule that shaped it, the decision that authorized it, and the members who held standing. Not an audit log bolted on after.
- Economics as governed social accounting. Obligations, treasury with budgets and approvals, mutual-credit positions, patronage settlement, usage-rights. Relational accounting between real parties — not a payment rail.
- Federation strengthens rather than dissolves. Cooperatives coordinate across boundaries through formal agreements and cross-institutional clearing without being merged into a single organization.
- Augment human institutions, do not replace them. Deliberation, judgment, care, politics, and revision stay with people. ICN reduces the fragility of the glue; it does not automate away the work.
- Honest about maturity. The project would rather be trusted than impressive. Every capability on the public site is placed in a bounded maturity band.
How to continue reading
This page is orientation. The site is organized as a sequence, and reading it in order is the intended path:
- What is ICN — the canonical definition, the loop, and what ICN is not.
- Why ICN — the institutional diagnosis this project exists to address.
- How it Works — the subsystems, in plain language, with maturity banding.
- What's Real Now — the direct account of which parts of the system are strongest, advancing, or still behind.
- For Cooperatives or For Developers — depending on who you are and what you need.
The technical reference layer lives beneath that. Architecture, documentation, and the source on GitHub are there for readers who want implementation detail.
How to engage with the project
If you are a cooperative, community, or federation evaluating ICN as institutional infrastructure, the most honest path right now is observation and early collaboration, not adoption. For Cooperatives describes the three realistic relationships in detail.
If you are a developer or technical reader, For Developers describes the architecture, the meaning firewall, and which parts of the system are worth reading first. The code is at github.com/InterCooperative-Network/icn; contribution paths are linked from there.
If you want to follow the work or talk to the people building it, the community page, blog, and GitHub discussions are the right places.
If you want the shortest route map instead of reading across multiple pages, use Get Involved. It is the current public intake surface for developers, non-technical contributors, institutions, and supporters.
If you want to support the work financially, the live rail today is GitHub Sponsors. There is no separate donation portal or paid support program advertised here.