Infrastructure the cooperative movement owns

ICN is software cooperatives own — instead of renting it from companies whose values run opposite to theirs.

The problem

Cooperatives have worked for 180 years, but the software they run on hasn't. Member lists, votes, documents, and patronage all live in tools rented from companies that can raise prices, change terms, or shut down — taking the cooperative's institutional memory with them. A movement built on democratic ownership runs on infrastructure built for extraction.

What ICN does

ICN — the InterCooperative Network — is open-source software that helps cooperatives:

• Keep durable records of who is a member and what was decided.
• Verify each other across organizational boundaries, with no vendor in the middle.
• Survive turnover — when founders leave, the institutional memory does not.
• Coordinate as a movement, not a scatter of unconnected organizations.

Each cooperative runs its own copy on its own server — no central platform, no subscription, no crypto, no company that owns the data.

Where it actually stands

ICN is pre-pilot and not production-ready. The substrate runs in development and demo environments; the member-facing apps are still being built. No cooperative is using ICN in production, and no one should put real member data on it today. What the evidence supports, and what it doesn't, is spelled out in the evidence map; the hard questions get direct answers in the hard-questions Q&A.

Open source · Not a vendor · Not for sale · github.com/InterCooperative-Network/icn