ICN Introduction Evidence Map

Every public claim in ICN's introduction materials should trace to a verifiable artifact, and every artifact has limits. This map lists the artifacts behind the claims in ICN_FOR_COOPERATIVE_MOVEMENT.md, ICN_FOR_EVERYONE.md, ICN_HANDBILL.md, and ICN_HARD_QUESTIONS.md — and states explicitly what each one does not prove.

For current project truth, defer to `docs/STATE.md` and `docs/PHASE_PROGRESS.md`. Merge states below were verified against GitHub on 2026-06-09.

How to read this

Each entry answers three questions:

1. What is it? The artifact, with a link.
2. What does it prove? The claim the artifact actually supports.
3. What does it NOT prove? The larger claim someone might be tempted to make, which this artifact does not support.

The honest summary of the whole table: ICN's strongest current evidence is local live-daemon proof and fixture-backed rehearsal. Nothing below is production evidence, pilot evidence, or adoption evidence.

Core proof artifacts (icn repository)

icn#1985 — live receipt-chain audit path reaches 13/13 (merged 2026-06-06)

• Proves: The full receipt chain — decision through authority, obligation, effect, dispatch, and receipt — can be audited end-to-end against a real local icnd daemon and gateway, with all thirteen verification links passing. This is live-execution evidence, not fixture playback.
• Does NOT prove: Multi-node operation, multi-institution federation, performance under load, production hardening, or that anyone outside the maintainer has run it.

icn#1997 — one-command local 13/13 receipt-chain rehearsal (merged 2026-06-09)

• Proves: The 13/13 receipt-chain demonstration is reproducible by a local operator with a single command. The proof in #1985 is not a one-off; it is packaged and repeatable from a repo checkout.
• Does NOT prove: That the rehearsal has been independently reproduced by a third party, or that it works outside the documented local environment.

icn#1998 — pending-publish summary row contract (merged 2026-06-09)

• Proves: A stable contract (schema) exists for summarizing pending-publish state, so rehearsal surfaces and audit tooling share one validated shape instead of ad-hoc output.
• Does NOT prove: Live production use of the contract. A contract is schema-level evidence (proof that the shape is defined and validated), not runtime evidence.

icn#1999 — fixture-backed rehearsal shell demo mode (merged 2026-06-09)

• Proves: A facilitated walkthrough of the receipt-chain story can run from recorded fixtures with no live infrastructure, making demonstrations portable and removing live-system risk from facilitation settings.
• Does NOT prove: Anything about live execution. Fixture mode is presentation-grade evidence by design; the live-execution evidence is #1985/#1997. Conflating the two modes is exactly the overclaim this evidence map exists to prevent.

icn#2000 — proof-level taxonomy and rehearsal capability matrix (merged 2026-06-09)

• Proves: ICN has a shared claim-boundary vocabulary (proof levels L0–L8, from design-only through production hardening) and a per-capability matrix, so contributors, facilitators, and reviewers cannot accidentally over- or under-claim. This is anti-overclaim infrastructure — it raises the honesty of claims, not the readiness of the system.
• Does NOT prove: Any capability's readiness. A taxonomy describes evidence; it doesn't create it.

Homelab deployment doc — self-hosted development-cluster deployment (in-repo operations doc)

• Proves: The ICN daemon has been deployed to and run on a small self-hosted K3s development cluster. The deployment manifests landed in this repository in early December 2025 (deploy/k8s, first commits 2025-12-04/05), the deployment doc's pilot-testing status section is dated 2025-12-05, and the doc records a cluster rebuild on 2026-02-21.
• Does NOT prove: Production use, continuous operation, multi-institution federation, or that any cooperative depends on this deployment. It is a development/demo environment operated by the maintainer.

Supporting merged work behind the receipt-chain path, for completeness: icn#1990 (durable effect-dispatch evidence persistence), icn#1993 (bounded dispatch-evidence backfill), icn#1996 (decision-hash ledger index for scalable receipt-chain lookup). These harden the evidence path; they carry the same limits as #1985.

Cross-repository artifacts

nycn#78 — live economic receipt-chain demo v4 (merged 2026-06-08)

• Proves: The ICN live receipt-chain path can be driven from an external repository (the NYCN organizing repo), reaching the same 13/13 audit-verified result over a real local icnd/gateway. The proof story is not confined to ICN's own test harness.
• Does NOT prove: Independent third-party validation (the demo is operated by the same maintainer), live NYCN institutional use of ICN, or any production relationship between NYCN and ICN.

icn-learn#3 — NYCN/Summit organizer learning path (merged 2026-05-18)

• Proves: A learning scaffold exists: eight modules translating ICN's institutional spine (standing, authority, decision, obligation, effect, receipt, evidence, review) into cooperative-organizer reality.
• Does NOT prove: That organizers have completed it, that it has been validated in a training setting, or anything about deployment. It is teaching material, not deployment or production documentation.

icn-community-bridge#1 — post-event follow-up bridge boundaries (merged 2026-05-18)

• Proves: The privacy boundary for movement-event follow-up is designed and written down: consent-first, no raw attendee mirroring, no identity collapsing, no private accessibility or care data. The project's data-minimal posture toward real communities is documented before any implementation exists.
• Does NOT prove: Implementation. This is a design note. No bridge software exists, and the note explicitly makes no implementation claim.

Claim-to-evidence quick reference

Claims absent from this table are absent on purpose: there is no production evidence, no pilot evidence, no multi-institution federation evidence, no private-data handling evidence, and no adoption evidence to cite.

Non-claims

What this evidence map does not claim:

• Not production-readiness. No artifact above is production evidence.
• Not a pilot. No artifact above authorizes or documents a pilot with any institution.
• Not live federation. No artifact above demonstrates federation between real institutions.
• Not private-data readiness. Every artifact above uses fictional or sanitized data.
• Not legal, privacy, or compliance advice.
• Not completeness of implementation. Specs and contracts cited here may describe capabilities that are design-only; the proof tier column states the boundary.
• Not adoption. No cooperative or institution has adopted ICN.

Maintenance note: when an artifact's state changes (e.g. icn#2000 merges, or a new proof tier is reached), update this map in the same change that lands the evidence — stale evidence claims are overclaims with a delay.