COSDS Update Week 3

Most software projects start with a repository. Ours started with a question from political philosophy: who protects you from the protector?

This August, the Network Theory Applied Research Institute welcomed a wave of new volunteers into the first annual Community Orchestration Software Development Sprint (COSDS). They are graduate students and recent computer science graduates scattered across the globe, working asynchronously in Slack and on ntari.org. And for their first ten weeks, they are not writing code. They are learning why the code they will write has to be different.

A curriculum that starts with the Leviathan

Volunteers are working through Introduction to Janus Facing Architecture, a six-week learning sprint that grounds NTARI’s research program in an old problem. Thomas Hobbes argued that people trade a monopoly on force for order; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson answered with a taxonomy of Leviathans — Despotic, Paper, Absent, and Shackled — and the “narrow corridor” where liberty survives only through a permanent race between state and society. Janus Facing Architecture (JFA), the new class of community software NTARI is researching and developing, accepts that framing and asks a wager-sized question: can the internet let the two faces of governance become two functions carried by one community, instead of two institutions facing each other?

The cohort’s progress is visible in the numbers. Every module ends in a long-answer examination — no multiple choice, just prompts like “why is the Red Queen race described as a mechanism rather than a friction to eliminate?” — and every quiz submitted so far has come back passed. The group’s answers keep converging on the same hard-won insight, which one volunteer summarized as “homeostasis, not harmony”: a healthy community is not one where everyone agrees, but one where disagreement is survivable, decisions are contestable, and losing an argument does not mean losing the ability to argue.

The federation reads together and argues together. Three posts a week in the volunteer channel is part of the coursework, and the threads have ranged from whether NTARI itself qualifies as a network state (the group’s consensus: no — it is closer to a manufacturer of network-state infrastructure than a state itself) to Emergency-era India, post-1987 South Korea, and Wikipedia’s arbitration system as live case studies of Leviathans wandering in and out of the corridor.

Those who have advanced into the second unit are now inside the stack itself, starting at the bottom: the substrate. Their exam answers describe it precisely — the coordination protocol as a “dependency leaf” that imports almost nothing, so that no host, vendor, or landlord can switch the community off; the difference between mechanical exit (you can fork the software) and social and economic exit (you can afford to leave); why an architecture of accountability has to begin with hardware the participants own.

The outlier who is already building

While the cohort studies, one volunteer is already deep in the stack’s Covenant layer. Siddhant Kodolkar, a recent master’s graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder, has spent the summer building the API for LBTAS — the Leveson-Based Trade Assessment Scale, NTARI’s aerospace-inspired trade rating system — in the open, commit by signed-off commit.

His running changelog in the #rand-covenant channel reads like the coursework made executable: negative ratings require a written justification, capped at 500 words, rejected rather than truncated if they exceed it. Ratings are scoped by role, so a party’s record as a seller cannot contaminate their record as a buyer. An adjudicator can dismiss a bad-faith rating without erasing it — the dismissal stays visible, with who and why. The rated party can contest; the adjudicator can uphold. Submission and review are gated by separate keys, because submitting a rating and judging one are distinct powers that must be authorized separately. Nine commits on one pull request, more behind it, every one carrying the Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off that keeps ownership of NTARI’s AGPL-3 code decentralized among the people who wrote it.

That is the Covenant layer’s whole thesis in miniature: accountability that annotates rather than erases, power that is split rather than pooled — written down where no one can quietly revise it.

Where this goes, and how to join

At week ten the federation splits into small teams and begins writing code — community orchestrators in the spirit of Agrinet and Soholink, software meant to make the lives of user communities richer, not just businesses. The sprint runs through May 2027, entirely remote, and NTARI is recruiting now.

Volunteers receive an ntari.org identity, access to professional AI and design tools, academic verification letters, and credit in the final product documentation. What NTARI asks in return is initiative: complete the volunteer orientation, keep your own hours honestly, read deeply, and post what you think.

If you want to learn how communities can govern their own software — and build the proof — join us by visiting ideali.st/o7d5rR.

The Network Theory Applied Research Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Louisville, Kentucky.