Developers and engineers
Build the workspace, read the architectural guardrails, and pick a first contribution path that matches the repo as it actually exists.
For Developers →
Open infrastructure effort
Infrastructure for democratic institutions.
The InterCooperative Network is shared digital infrastructure for cooperatives, communities, and federations. It helps institutions keep decisions, records, obligations, and coordination on infrastructure they can govern.
For institutions that need durable capacity, not another disconnected software stack.
Engagement Paths
Four concrete ways to engage.
The project has different entry points for technical contributors, non-code collaborators, institutions, and financial supporters. Start with the path that matches what you are actually here to do.
Writers, designers, researchers, organizers
Contribute documentation, design, policy thinking, testing, and ecosystem work without pretending the project is code-only.
Non-technical contribution →Cooperatives and institutions
Read the institutional framing first, then use the current discussion-led engagement path if your organization has a real use case and real capacity.
For Cooperatives →Financial supporters
GitHub Sponsors is the live support rail today. Use it if you want to sustain the work without inventing a funding structure that does not exist.
Support on GitHub ↗ The Problem
Most democratic institutions still operate across software that does not model the institution itself.
Governance happens in meetings and minutes. Policy lives in documents that are read inconsistently. Membership sits in a CRM built for a sales team. Accounting lives in a system that has no idea what was decided. Execution depends on whoever remembered what they were supposed to do.
In practice, that often means Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for documents and email, Loomio for voting, QuickBooks for accounting, Slack or Teams for coordination, and a CRM or spreadsheet standing in for membership and standing.
Each tool is fine in isolation. Together, they produce drift. Decisions do not reliably become action. Rules do not reliably bind practice. Accountability decays into trust in individual people instead of trust in the institution.
Beneath the operational friction is a deeper dependency problem: democratic institutions are still expected to rely on digital systems controlled by outside owners, outside incentives, and outside priorities.
Credit unions, fiscal sponsors, and community development financial institutions (CDFIs) help cooperatives interface with the existing economy. ICN is the machinery a cooperative economy needs on its own side of the bridge.
Core Capabilities
An infrastructure layer for governance, records, and coordination.
ICN provides the layer where membership, governance, economic coordination, execution, and institutional memory remain connected instead of being split across unrelated systems.
Identity · Standing · Authority
Scopes as first-class institutions
A member, a cooperative, a community, a federation, and a commons are each a scope the system knows about directly — with their own rules, members, and history. Not user groups layered on a platform.
Governance · Policy · Execution
Governance that carries into action
Proposals, deliberation, and accepted decisions produce durable records and carry into real operational effect — where the system's execution coverage reaches.
Receipts · Provenance
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. The chain is the record the institution runs on — not an audit log bolted on after.
Accounting
Economics as governed social accounting
Obligations, treasury with budgets and approvals, patronage settlement, mutual-credit positions, and usage-rights accounting. Relational, denominated in obligations between real parties — not a payment rail.
Federation
Federation as treaty, not merger
Cooperatives enter formal agreements, exchange attestations, and settle obligations across their boundaries through cross-institutional clearing — without being dissolved into a single organization.
Commons · Compute
Commons and compute as shared infrastructure
Shared resources and coordinated work across the network — with clearing, trust-aware placement, and dispute resolution for compute results — participate in the same loop as governance and accounting, not a separate system. Compute carries out what authority asked; it does not decide institutional outcomes.
The Closure Loop
Nine stations, one institution.
ICN carries the full institutional chain — standing, authority, decisions, action, and the record of what happened — as one substrate, station by station.
Truth label repo-grounded public explainer
- Identity
- Standing
- Authority
- Governance
- Policy
- Accounting
- Execution
- Receipts & Provenance
- Member Experience
What is ICN walks through each station in plain language. How It Works goes deeper into each subsystem.
What's Real Now
Current maturity.
Different parts of ICN are at different levels of maturity. This section states those differences plainly.
Strong today
Provenance and auditable coordination — receipts, decision-to-outcome chains, and the institutional memory the rest of the system depends on. Cryptographic identity and membership primitives are in place.
Advancing now
Execution coverage — the breadth of decisions that translate into real operational effect — is where active work is concentrated. The mechanism exists; the range of decisions it handles is expanding.
Real but maturing
Federation and commons/compute have serious implementation behind them — treaties, attestations, cross-institutional clearing, shared resource governance. These subsystems are real and advancing.
Behind the system
The member-facing experience — where identity, standing, governance, accounting, and receipts converge into something a person can actually see and use — is the part most visibly trailing the capabilities underneath.
Who It's For
Institutions, not user groups.
Cooperatives, communities, and federations
Organizations that already know how hard running a real institution is, and are tired of doing it through software that was never designed for the job. ICN is being built for you — and we try to be honest about what is usable today versus what is still being built.
For Cooperatives →Developers, architects, and researchers
Technical readers evaluating ICN as a system. Kernel/app separation with a strict meaning firewall, trust-native architecture, mutual-credit accounting, and an honest account of current implementation state.
For Developers → Why It Matters
Advanced technology, primitive institutional forms.
We have built extraordinary software over the last forty years and used almost none of it to make our institutions more legible, more accountable, or more co-authored by the people inside them. Most of our collective life still runs on tools built for firms, platforms, and administrative convenience.
ICN is one attempt to close that gap. Not by replacing deliberation, judgment, politics, or human responsibility — those stay with people — but by giving institutions better memory, better continuity, better accountability, better legibility, and better collective capacity. So that the work of running a cooperative, a community, or a federation rests on something more durable than whoever happens to be holding the pieces together today.
That is a narrower claim than "ICN fixes democratic institutions," and a more honest one.
Where to go next
If you are here to understand the project, start reading. If you are here to help shape it, use the engagement paths directly.