What's Real Now
ICN has uneven maturity across its subsystems. This page states what is proven, what is advancing, and what is not yet complete. Every other page on this site should be readable against what is here without contradiction.
ICN is in Phase 2 — Pilot Launch — and Phase 2 is not complete. Phase 0 and Phase 1 are complete. The strongest current path is institutional coordination: member standing, action cards, governance actions, receipts, and retrievable provenance. The member-facing demo surface is real enough to show the shape of the system, but it is still maturing and must not be presented as a finished product.
How to read this page
ICN is large, and different parts of the system are at different levels of maturity. We describe maturity in four bands. Every capability claim on this site belongs in one of them.
Implemented, integrated, and load-bearing. These are capabilities we are prepared to stand behind in public.
Actively under development with visible progress. Not finished, but moving.
Serious implementation exists. Surfaces and integrations are still being finished.
Scoped, but not where work is concentrated right now. We would rather say that directly than imply a schedule.
Strong today
Provenance and institutional memory. The strongest mature part of ICN is the chain that carries an outcome back through the rule that shaped it, the decision that authorized it, and the member standing that made action legitimate.
Member standing. A member-facing read model can answer the basic institutional question: who am I here, what domains do I belong to, what roles do I hold, and what authority scopes are currently available to me?
Action cards. Action cards now exist as a member-facing read model and have begun appearing in the pilot UI demo path. The currently exercised source paths are proposal/vote, action_item/complete, and meeting/attend. Other source paths remain gated and should not be presented as complete.
Institutional activation. An institution package can describe entities, structures, activities, and roles; a charter can be activated against a node; members can be bound to package definitions through a private overlay; and member standing can be surfaced through the gateway.
Structural discipline. The enforcement layer handles generic constraints while the application layer interprets institutional meaning. This meaning firewall is one of the core design lines that keeps the system coherent as it grows.
Advancing now
The guided organizer/member demo. The pilot UI can open a guided demo mode and render fixture-backed member standing and action cards without requiring a live gateway login. That is not full demo mode for the entire system. It is the first narrow slice of the human-facing path.
Governance fixture coverage. The next useful demo slice is a governance proposal/vote fixture so the local story can move from standing to action cards to a visible governance action. Receipt/provenance fixtures should follow after that.
Receipt storage and retrieval. ICN is hardening the path by which app-level receipt records can be stored and retrieved while preserving the boundary between generic infrastructure and institution-specific meaning.
Real but maturing
Federation. Inter-institutional coordination is a serious subsystem with real implementation behind it, but no two cooperatives are federating in production over ICN today. Federation must not be confused with peer connectivity or local demo fixtures.
Commons and compute. Shared infrastructure participates in the same institutional loop as governance and accounting. Compute can produce evidence and support deliberation, but it does not decide governance outcomes.
Economic semantics. ICN uses settlement, unit, position, obligation, allocation, receipt, and provenance language. The governed-social-accounting framing is real; the cross-scope integration story is still being completed.
Member-facing experience. Identity, participation, standing, action cards, and receipts are converging toward a coherent member surface. The surface exists, but it still needs more demo coverage, accessibility verification, and organizer rehearsal.
Not yet, or not yet publicly surfaced
ICN is not a finished production network and there is no live federation deployment. The current demo mode has fixture-backed standing and action cards, but governance, receipts, ledger, members, trust, and federation are not yet fully fixture-backed.
ICN has design direction for governed services, service identities, tool manifests, tool bindings, and institution-owned tool state. That is not the same thing as implemented service hosting or a live tool ecosystem.
Privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, steward networks, and post-quantum cryptography exist as dedicated subsystems or source-level primitives. They should not be turned into broad public claims until their runtime integration, user-facing role, and production posture are verified for the specific claim being made.
Accessibility is a participation floor, not a feature. The design doctrine is clear; the runtime and demo acceptance gates still need continued enforcement across real member-facing surfaces.
What this page commits to
Every capability claim on this site is grounded in the maturity bands above. If something is described as strong today, it is implemented and in use. If something is described as advancing, it is under active development but not finished. If something is described as maturing, serious implementation exists but surfaces, integrations, or public story remain incomplete.
Where to look directly
- Architecture reference — the technical deep-dive synced from the repo
- Documentation — current developer and operator docs
- Source on GitHub — the ground truth