Archived / superseded document. Current source of truth: docs/strategy/ICN-Roadmap-Live.md

ICN Forward Plan — March 2026

Document status: Archived planning snapshot (2026-03-12) Last updated: 2026-03-12 Author: Matt Faherty Canonical location: .claude_launchpad/icn-forward-plan.md (launchpad) + docs/planning/FORWARD_PLAN_2026-03.md (ICN repo)

Table of Contents

1. Current State Audit
2. Strategic Frame
3. Phase 0 — Clean Slate
4. Phase 1 — Compliance Sprint
5. Phase 2 — Vertical Slice
6. Phase 3 — Website Overhaul
7. Phase 4 — Grant Applications & Summit
8. Developer Attraction Funnel
9. Timeline Summary
10. Open Issues Reference

1. Current State Audit

Audit date: 2026-03-12 Source: Live icn-dev inspection via SSH + GitHub API

Repository Structure

Season 14 — What Landed (March 5–6, 2026)

Five PRs merged in a two-day sprint:

Last main-branch commit: March 6. Nothing landed in 6 days — development parked on demo branch.

Current Branch

feat/demo-federation-system — 27 commits ahead of main, all demo infrastructure:

• 4 presenter-mode demo flows (governance, patronage, federation, reporting)
• present.sh tmux two-pane launcher
• Beat markers, narrated output mode
• reseed-federation-demo.sh, reset-demo.sh
• Seed data for four federation personas
• ops/mcp v2 commit (should be on main already)

Status: Done. Needs to merge.

Open Epics

#1302 Compliance Epic — Actual Status

Three checkboxes in #1302 are done but not marked. Fix immediately.

#1147 Vertical Slice — Track Summary

Success criteria:

icnctl coop create
  → treasury DID
  → member applies → governance vote → approved
  → Decision Receipt → Allocation Receipt → Execution Receipt
  → icnctl audit verify ✓
  → CI test passes

Infrastructure

Website Audit

2. Strategic Frame

ICN has three time-sensitive events:

March 19 — NY Coop Summit Planning Call

• Joe Marraffino hosting via Google Meet, 2pm EDT
• Matt's goal: volunteer for tech/infrastructure track + propose ICN workshop for May call for presenters
• Required state: Clear demo narrative ready, "Institution-in-a-Box" framing locked
• RSVP still needsAction — must confirm to Joe before March 19

May — Call for Presenters (NY Coop Summit, Oct 2026)

• ICN workshop proposal goes in: "Live Demo: Spin Up a Cooperative in 5 Minutes"
• Required state: Demo flows running against real system calls (Track D done), vertical slice test passing
• The cooperative movement audience is organizers, not developers — pitch is Stage A of VISION.md

Sovereign Tech Fund (Rolling Deadline → Target: April)

• €50K+ grant for open source digital infrastructure
• ~6 months to contract: April application → October funding (pre-summit)
• Required state: Regulatory-clean language (#1302 done), working demo, vertical slice proof
• ICN framing: "Digital public infrastructure for cooperative governance" — never "ledger" or "payment"

Funding Gate A (Background)

• Fiscal sponsorship (Hack Club Bank) + W-2 payroll at $1,200/month
• Requires ACCES-VR medical release (waiting on mail) + business plan v2 (done)
• Working vertical slice is the "product" that justifies the business plan

3. Phase 0 — Clean Slate (Today, ~2 hours)

These four actions unblock everything downstream.

0.1 Merge feat/demo-federation-system → main

# On icn-dev
cd ~/projects/icn
git checkout main
git merge feat/demo-federation-system --no-ff -m "feat(demo): merge federation demo system — four flows, presenter mode, ops/mcp v2"
git push origin main

Why first: 27 commits of shipped work sitting off-branch is noise. After merge, PR count crosses 1330+, which updates the stats display meaningfully. Also resets the working context to main.

0.2 Fix PR #1329 — Add missing labels, merge dependabot bump

# Add labels to the InterCooperative-Network/icn repo
gh label create "sdk" --color "0075ca" --description "SDK-related changes" -R InterCooperative-Network/icn
gh label create "typescript" --color "3178c6" --description "TypeScript code" -R InterCooperative-Network/icn

# Approve and merge
gh pr review 1329 --approve -R InterCooperative-Network/icn
gh pr merge 1329 --squash -R InterCooperative-Network/icn

0.3 Mark completed #1302 checklist items

Edit issue body for #1302 to check:

• #1307 PatronageTracker (done via PR #1325)
• #1309 DelegationManager persist (done via PR #1326)
• #1310 ExecutionReceiptGate (done via PR #1327)

# Use gh to edit the issue body or just do it in the GitHub web UI
gh issue edit 1302 --body "$(gh issue view 1302 --json body -q .body | \
  sed 's/- \[ \] #1307/- [x] #1307/' | \
  sed 's/- \[ \] #1309/- [x] #1309/' | \
  sed 's/- \[ \] #1310/- [x] #1310/')" -R InterCooperative-Network/icn

0.4 Trigger website sync + deploy

# On icn-dev — rebuild and deploy with current stats
cd ~/projects/icn-website
npm run sync && npm run deploy

Stats will show: 1330+ PRs, current commit, accurate branch count. Takes ~10 minutes.

4. Phase 1 — Compliance Sprint (Days 1–4)

Closes epic #1302 entirely. Required before Sovereign Tech Fund application.

Why this before Vertical Slice: The grant and cooperative movement positioning both depend on ICN using regulatory-safe language. The codebase is architecturally correct already — it just uses words (payment, currency, balance) that create unnecessary exposure. Phase 1 fixes the vocabulary without changing any behavior.

Day 1 — Terminology Rename (#1303 + #1304)

#1303: Rename across gateway API, OpenAPI spec, field names, docs:

• payment → settlement
• currency → unit
• balance → position

This is grep-and-replace plus test updates. Nothing behavioral changes.

#1304: Write the Seven Invariants as a PR checklist in CONTRIBUTING.md:

1. User-signed transitions only
2. No hosted balances
3. No operator routing of value
4. Derived views are not authoritative
5. No embedded convertibility
6. Matching/market features are opt-in, scoped, governance-authorized
7. Execution receipts close the governance loop

Also write the UX language guide: what words ICN uses and why (settlement not payment, obligation not debt, position not balance).

Day 2 — Structural Attestation (#1305 + #1306)

#1305: Make JournalEntry.provenance required. Every ledger entry must carry a ProvenanceRef linking it to the governance decision that authorized it. No provenance = invalid entry = compile error.

#1306: Add Obligation type with explicit lifecycle:

enum ObligationState {
    Issued,
    Accepted,
    Settled,
    Defaulted,
    Disputed,
}

Uses AssetType::Claim (already defined). This is the structural proof that ICN tracks obligations, not money movement. An obligation is a claim on future value, not a balance.

Day 3 — CCL Formula + AllocationProposal (#1308 + #1311)

#1308: Extract the commons credit formula from kernel Rust code into a CCL PolicyOracle parameter. This is pure meaning firewall hygiene — the kernel should not contain the formula for "how much credit does a contribution earn." That's cooperative policy, not protocol mechanics.

#1311: Add AllocationProposal — a governance proposal type that, when accepted, produces a linked AllocationReceipt. This closes the loop: you can't allocate resources without a governance decision, and every allocation proves its authorization. The ExecutionReceiptGate (already done, t16) then requires an ExecutionReceipt to close the allocation.

Day 4 — CI Linter (#1312) + Close Epic

#1312: GitHub Actions check that fails CI if the strings CreatePaymentRequest, payment (as an HTTP endpoint), or balance (as a gateway-exposed field) appear in the codebase. Makes the terminology discipline self-enforcing — no future PR can accidentally revert it.

After this: close epic #1302. Update CONTRIBUTING.md to reference the Seven Invariants checklist in the PR template.

5. Phase 2 — Vertical Slice (Weeks 2–4)

Closes epic #1147. The proof that ICN works end-to-end.

Success criteria (non-negotiable):

icnctl coop create --name "Harbor Homes" --charter ./charters/default.toml
# → DID created, treasury DID linked

icnctl member apply --coop did:icn:harbor-homes --identity did:icn:alice
# → application recorded

icnctl vote --proposal governance/001 --choice yes
# → vote counted, quorum check, Decision Receipt produced

icnctl audit verify --receipt did:icn:receipt/decision/001
# → AllocationReceipt linked, ExecutionReceipt linked, chain verified ✓

cargo test --test vertical_slice_integration -- --nocapture
# → PASS in CI

Track Execution Order

Track B first (Treasury & Economics, ~5 days):

This is the critical path. S14 gave us the receipt gate and patronage tracker. Track B wires them into the complete economic loop:

• B1: Treasury-coop integration — icnctl coop create produces a treasury DID, treasury is owned by the coop not by any individual
• B2: Asset type foundation — type hierarchy that Obligation and AllocationProposal sit inside
• B3: Allocation receipt chain — accepted proposals produce receipts, receipts close allocations, full audit trail is provable

Track A in parallel (Remaining Kernel/App Separation, ~4 days):

• A1: State generalization — remaining generic state types that still have domain-specific leakage
• A2: Governance extraction — remaining governance types still directly imported by kernel
• A3: Membership consolidation — unify the dual apps/ and icn/apps/ membership code paths (see ADR-0010)
• A4: Kernel cleanup — remove last residual direct imports; cargo deny check passes clean

Track C (Ops & Pilot Prep, ~3 days):

• C1: Backup validation — automated test that backup → restore → verify produces identical state
• C2: Pre-deployment health check — icnctl health --full that validates config, identity, storage, network before first run
• C3: NAT traversal — enables the four K3s coop pods to federate with each other for real. This transforms the demo from "simulated" to "live"

Track D (Integration, ~2 days):

• D1: Vertical slice integration test — single cargo test --test vertical_slice_integration that exercises the complete chain
• D2: Update demo scripts — the four flows in demo/scripts/ now call real icnctl commands instead of simulated responses. When D2 is done, present.sh is a live demo, not theater.

Track E (Compute Substrate, weeks 3–4+):

The Stage C vision from VISION.md — communities contributing compute, earning mana, spending on shared services. Runs after D1 closes.

• E1: Workload manifest schema — defines what a compute task looks like
• E2: Execution receipt completion — compute tasks produce receipts that close governance allocations
• E3: Deterministic vs. advisory classification — which compute results must be deterministic
• E4: Storage specification — how compute tasks access and commit storage
• E5: Cell operator boundary — what it means to be a "cell" (compute node) in the network
• E6: Individual node ownership mode — a node can contribute compute without joining a coop
• E7: Commons compute governance — how the mana formula works, CCL integration

After Phase 2: tag v1.0.0. This is the number that matters. The vertical slice integration test passing is the definition of 1.0.

6. Phase 3 — Website Overhaul (Parallel with Phase 2)

6.1 Stats Sync Automation

Add a nightly GitHub Actions cron to icn-website:

# .github/workflows/nightly-sync.yml
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *'  # 6am UTC daily
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  sync-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: InterCooperative-Network/icn-website
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: InterCooperative-Network/icn
          path: icn-repo
          token: ${{ secrets.ICN_REPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: ICN_REPO=./icn-repo npm run sync
      - run: npm run build
      - uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./dist

After this: stats always reflect the real repo. The homepage shows 1330+ PRs, 440K+ lines of Rust, 4420+ tests. These numbers are credible. Automate showing them.

6.2 Blog — Four Posts (Priority Order)

Post 1: "What ICN Is (And What It Isn't)"

• Target: Hacker News, r/rust, r/selfhosted
• Content: Constraint engine model, meaning firewall, why not blockchain, why not a federation server
• Tone: Matt's voice — confrontational, technically precise, anti-bullshit
• Hook: "We built a daemon that runs cooperative governance. Not a DAO. Not a blockchain. A daemon."
• Key point: ICN is P2P infrastructure. Not a product for end users. Infrastructure for groups.

Post 2: "Season 14: Closing the Economic Loop"

• Target: Cooperative tech community, open source contributors
• Content: What the five S14 PRs accomplished — PatronageTracker (NY Corp Law §93), ExecutionReceiptGate, DelegationManager
• Include: Rust code snippets, what these concepts mean for a real cooperative
• Hook: "A cooperative's treasury shouldn't trust any one person's computer. Here's how we wired that."

Post 3: "Institution-in-a-Box: A Live Demo"

• Target: Cooperative organizers, summit attendees, Sovereign Tech Fund reviewers
• Content: Walk through the four demo flows as a blog post with terminal output screenshots
• This is the post shared at the March 19 summit call and in the May workshop proposal
• Hook: "Spin up a cooperative. Give it rules. Give it money flows. Give it governance."

Post 4: "Regulatory Safety by Architecture"

• Target: Sovereign Tech Fund application pre-read, legal-minded cooperative developers
• Content: The Seven Invariants, why "no hosted balances" is a design choice not a limitation, how the obligation model works, why ICN is not a payment rail
• Hook: "The word 'payment' doesn't appear in our codebase anymore. Here's why that matters."

6.3 Community Page Overhaul

Add Matrix room:

Matrix is aligned with cooperative values (federated, sovereign, no corporate dependency). Create #icn-dev:matrix.org or self-host on the homelab (Element + Synapse). The room needs to exist and be responded to. One thoughtful reply per day is enough to feel alive.

Add "Good First Issues" section:

Label a dozen well-scoped issues good-first-issue in GitHub. Surface them on the community page with:

• Issue title
• One-sentence description of what's needed
• Estimated complexity (small/medium)
• Link to the issue

Good candidates from the current issue list: documentation gaps, test coverage improvements, terminology rename work from #1303, TypeScript SDK improvements.

Add cooperative operator mailing list:

The cooperative movement audience doesn't live on GitHub or Matrix. Organizers use email. Set up a monthly "ICN Update" on Buttondown (free tier, no tracking):

• 200–300 words
• One concrete demo or milestone
• One call to action (test this, share this, come to the workshop)
• Link to the latest blog post

List should be linked from the community page and the blog sidebar.

6.4 Roadmap Page — Make It Live

Current roadmap renders PHASE_HISTORY.md (historical). Add a "Current Focus" section above it that renders from a small roadmap-current.yaml file tracked in the website repo:

current_phase: "Vertical Slice"
current_epic: "https://github.com/InterCooperative-Network/icn/issues/1147"
stage: "A"
stage_name: "Institution-in-a-Box"
milestones:
  - title: "Season 14 complete"
    date: "2026-03-06"
    done: true
  - title: "Compliance sprint (#1302)"
    date: "2026-03-20"
    done: false
  - title: "Vertical Slice integration test"
    date: "2026-04-10"
    done: false
  - title: "v1.0.0 tag"
    date: "2026-04-15"
    done: false

This gives visitors an honest sense of where the project is without requiring them to dig through 1300+ GitHub issues.

7. Phase 4 — Grant Applications & Summit (April–May)

Sovereign Tech Fund Application (Target: April)

URL: apply.sovereigntechfund.de Grant size: €50K+ (no stated maximum), rolling deadline Timeline: ~6 months to contract → April application → October funding

Application narrative (draft framing):

ICN is open-source digital infrastructure for cooperative governance. It provides: verifiable identity and membership management, democratic proposal and voting mechanisms with cryptographic receipts, mutual credit and resource allocation without hosted balances, and P2P federation between groups — all without blockchain, without central servers, and without operator-held funds.

ICN is not a product. It is the infrastructure layer that cooperative organizations, community groups, and democratic institutions need to run their own digital governance without depending on corporate platforms.

Deployment: ICN runs on a K3s cluster serving four pilot cooperative nodes. The daemon (icnd) maintains local state, gossips with peers, enforces governance constraints, and produces auditable receipts for every decision. The CLI (icnctl) provides operator and member interfaces. The TypeScript SDK integrates with web applications.

Required before applying:

• Phase 1 complete (regulatory-clean language)
• At least Track B of Phase 2 in progress (treasury integration)
• Post 4 blog post published (regulatory safety)

NY Coop Summit Workshop Proposal (May Call for Presenters)

Workshop title: "Institution-in-a-Box: Live Demo of P2P Cooperative Governance" Format: 20-minute live walkthrough + 10 min Q&A Target audience: Cooperative organizers, not developers

Demo script outline:

1. icnctl coop create --name "Harbor Homes" → watch the DID and treasury appear
2. Member onboarding: icnctl member apply → governance vote
3. Proposal: allocate $500 for roof repair → vote → Decision Receipt
4. Execution: receipt links to work order, closes the governance loop
5. Audit: icnctl audit verify → full provenance chain visible

Required before submitting:

• Demo flows running against real icnctl commands (Track D done)
• NAT traversal working (Track C3) so it can run live from a laptop

March 19 — Summit Planning Call Prep

Prep checklist:

• RSVP to Joe Marraffino's Google Meet invite (currently needsAction)
• Prepare 2-minute "ICN tech track" pitch — what it is, what's ready, what the workshop would look like
• Bring the "Institution-in-a-Box" framing from VISION.md
• Propose: ICN as the tech infrastructure track for the October summit
• Reference: the cooperative movement already does governance on Google Docs and Signal. ICN is the infrastructure they've been missing.

8. Developer Attraction Funnel

Three channels: search, referral, community.

Search (Hacker News + r/rust)

One strong post reaches more developers than six months of GitHub activity. The "What ICN Is (And What It Isn't)" post is engineered for this:

• Rust community has strong opinions about P2P systems
• Cooperative/tech-left community has strong opinions about platform alternatives
• Anti-blockchain positioning is explicitly stated — this is controversy that generates discussion
• Submit to HN as "Show HN: ICN — a P2P daemon for cooperative governance (not a blockchain)"

Referral (Cooperative Tech Network)

TechCollective (Yochai Gal + Jeff Brite): Worker-owned MSP with 20 years of cooperative tech experience. Joe Marraffino made warm intros in December 2025. Ball is in Matt's court — Yochai and Jeff both replied, no follow-up in 85+ days. Follow up separately from any job inquiry: "Here's where ICN is, here's the demo, does this fit anything TechCollective or its members might want to evaluate?" A credibility endorsement from TechCollective to the cooperative tech ecosystem is worth more than any amount of self-promotion.

RCC (Rochester Cooperative Collective): Local cooperative network where Matt is already known. ICN should be on the agenda at a future RCC meeting as a 10-minute demo. Real questions from real cooperative organizers are the best product feedback available.

CFNE + ICA + summit network: These are the distribution channels for the cooperative movement. The blog posts, workshop proposal, and mailing list are the instruments. The summit itself (October 2026) is the highest-leverage single event.

Community (Matrix + Good First Issues)

Matrix room: Needs to exist. Low traffic is fine. The goal is that someone who finds the repo can ask a question and get a response within 24 hours. That alone differentiates ICN from 90% of interesting-but-abandoned GitHub repos.

Good first issues: Label them correctly. Write clear descriptions. Respond to PRs within 48 hours. One developer who closes a good-first-issue and gets a thoughtful review has a better chance of becoming a contributor than 100 people who starred the repo.

The cooperative movement as deployment pipeline: The most powerful developer recruitment is a real user. If Harbor Homes Cooperative runs ICN for their governance, that story — told in a blog post — attracts developers who want to build things that are used.

9. Timeline Summary

10. Open Issues Reference

Must-do before STF application

• #1303 Rename payment→settlement, currency→unit, balance→position
• #1304 UX language guide + Seven Invariants PR checklist
• #1305 JournalEntry.provenance required
• #1306 Obligation type with lifecycle
• #1308 CCL formula extraction
• #1311 AllocationProposal
• #1312 Compliance CI linter

Vertical slice critical path

• #1139 Treasury-coop integration (B1)
• #1140 Asset type foundation (B2)
• #1141 Allocation receipt chain (B3)
• #1145 Vertical slice integration test (D1)
• #1146 Demo script update to real calls (D2)

Compute substrate (post v1.0)

• #1128 Workload manifest schema (E1)
• #1129 Execution receipt completion (E2)
• #1130 Deterministic vs advisory classification (E3)
• #1131 Storage specification (E4)
• #1132 Cell operator boundary (E5)
• #1133 Individual node ownership mode (E6)
• #1134 Commons compute governance (E7)

Housekeeping

• #1329 Merge dependabot TS SDK bump (needs sdk + typescript labels)
• ADR-0010 App topology cleanup (dual apps/ roots)
• Periodic cargo clean in icn-wt worktrees (currently 55G)

Document generated 2026-03-12. Update this file when phase completions occur. Canonical sources: GitHub issues for task state, WORKLOG.md for session activity, TASKS.md for personal deadlines.