ICN - InterCooperative Network
A shared infrastructure effort for cooperatives, communities, and federations.
intercooperative.network
ICN is institutional infrastructure for democratic organizations. It is being built so cooperatives, communities, and federations can prove decisions, operate on infrastructure they control, and coordinate across organizational boundaries without handing those functions to a platform landlord.
The Rust workspace lives in icn/. The public site lives in website/. The project is large and uneven in maturity, so the fastest way to avoid getting lost is to start from the right entrypoint for your role.
Start Here by Role
- Want the whole ecosystem at a glance?: read the Ecosystem Atlas — what every repo owns, where each fact's canonical source lives, and what to read first (humans and agents).
- Understand the project first: start with intercooperative.network, especially What is ICN, What's Real Now, and Get Involved.
- Contribute technically: read docs/GETTING_STARTED.md, then CONTRIBUTING.md, then docs/onboarding/README.md. For a first scoped contribution, start with good first issues.
- Contribute non-technically: use the public Get Involved page for docs, design, testing, research, policy, and ecosystem paths, then open a GitHub Discussion or issue once the work is concrete.
- Bring an institutional use case: read For Cooperatives and What's Real Now, then open a GitHub Discussion.
- Support the work financially: the live rail today is GitHub Sponsors.
Developer Quickstart
If you want to build the codebase and orient quickly:
git clone https://github.com/InterCooperative-Network/icn.git
cd icn/icn
cargo build
cargo test --workspace --lib
Before opening a PR, read:
What ICN Provides
- Decentralized Identity — DIDs with Ed25519 cryptography and Age-encrypted keystores
- Trust Graph — Web-of-participation trust computation with signed attestations
- Mutual Credit Ledger — Double-entry accounting with Merkle-DAG integrity
- Cooperative Contracts — CCL (Cooperative Contract Language) for expressing bylaws, agreements, and governance
- P2P Networking — QUIC/TLS sessions with mDNS discovery and gossip replication
- Democratic Governance — Proposals, voting, and parameter management
- Distributed Compute — Trust-gated task execution with receipt settlement
Architecture
ICN implements a constraint enforcement architecture:
CCL Document (constitution / bylaws / treaty)
|
App / Policy Oracle (governance, trust, ledger)
|
ConstraintSet (rate limits, credit ceilings, voting weights)
|
Kernel enforces constraints mechanically
The kernel never sees "trust scores" or "governance rules" — only generic constraints. This is the Meaning Firewall: domain semantics stay in apps, the kernel stays predictable.
See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full architecture documentation.
Repo Map
The repo is split across several surfaces:
icn/ — Rust workspace: crates in icn/crates/, runtime apps in icn/apps/, binaries in icn/bins/website/ — public site for intercooperative.networkdocs/ — architecture, reference, contributor, and operator documentationinstitutions/ — in-monorepo institution packages such as institutions/nycn/, kept boundary-clean for later extractionsdk/ — TypeScript and React Native SDK workdeploy/ — deployment manifests and cluster configuration
Common Ports
| Service | Port | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|
| Peer Transport | 7777 | QUIC/UDP | P2P communication |
| RPC API | 5601 | HTTP | CLI control (icnctl) |
| Metrics | 9100 | HTTP | Prometheus exporter |
| Health | 8080 | HTTP | Health checks |
Development
cd icn
cargo build
cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace --lib
Run the checks that match what you touched. AGENTS.md is the routing table for Rust crates, website work, SDK work, and docs changes.
Security
ICN implements three-layer security:
- Transport — QUIC/TLS with DID-TLS certificate binding
- Message — Ed25519 signed envelopes with replay protection
- Application — E2E encryption with X25519-ChaCha20-Poly1305
Trust-gated rate limiting enforces per-actor throughput bounds based on trust class. See docs/production-hardening.md.
Documentation
Status
ICN is real, active, and uneven in maturity. The strongest parts today are provenance, cryptographic identity, and the decision-to-record path. Member-facing polish, broader execution coverage, and cleaner onboarding surfaces are still being built. For the current truth plane, read docs/STATE.md and the public What's Real Now page.
License
The root LICENSE file contains AGPL-3.0. The Rust workspace metadata in icn/Cargo.toml declares MIT OR Apache-2.0, and most crates in the workspace either declare it explicitly or inherit it via license.workspace = true. See LICENSING.md for current repository license metadata and open licensing questions; that document is not legal advice and does not relicense any code.
