NTARI Advances Community Technology Infrastructure Across Four Initiatives

LOUISVILLE, KY — The Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI), a Louisville-based nonprofit building community-owned technology as an alternative to Big Tech platforms, announced this week that its volunteer teams made significant progress across four active projects: a community computing network, a cooperative operating system, a network agriculture platform, and a new security program.

SoHoLINK: Community Computing Network Reaches Launch Readiness

SoHoLINK is NTARI's answer to a simple question: what if people could rent out spare computing power on their home or office computers — and get paid — without going through Amazon, Google, or any other corporate middleman?

Think of it like Airbnb, but for computing power, and owned cooperatively by the people who use it.

This week, the SoHoLINK development team finished the last of 23 outstanding items needed before a public launch. Among the improvements:

• Smarter job routing — The system now learns over time which computers in the network are most reliable for different kinds of tasks, rather than assigning work randomly.

• A buyer-side marketplace — People looking to use computing power can now browse available providers, see estimated costs, and pay using Bitcoin's Lightning Network directly inside the app.

• Safety and legal foundations — The platform now scans uploaded files against known databases of illegal content, blocks bad actors from rejoining under new identities, and comes with Terms of Service, DMCA takedown procedures, and law enforcement response protocols in place before opening to the public.

• Security audit passed — An independent code security scan found zero high-severity issues after the team worked through 29 flagged items. No known software vulnerabilities remain in the codebase.

The software is free and open-source, published under a license that prevents corporations from taking it private. It is being prepared for release.

NTARI OS: An Operating System Built for Community Networks

Most operating systems — Windows, macOS, Android — are designed to serve individual users and the companies behind them. NTARI OS is designed for something different: running the shared infrastructure of a cooperative community network.

Imagine a neighborhood co-op that wanted to run its own internet services — local file storage, a community website, a shared calendar. NTARI OS is what they would install on the computers running those services, purpose-built to keep those systems healthy, connected, and accountable to the community rather than a distant corporation.

This week, the team completed the final two phases of a twelve-phase development roadmap:

• Cooperative role assignment — Nodes in the network now automatically figure out what role they are best suited for — handling computation, storing files, or relaying data — based on their hardware and the community's rules for how resources should be shared.

• Wide area networking — Nodes can now manage their own connection to the broader internet and communicate with other nodes even across different networks, with optional support for advanced routing protocols used by internet service providers.

The team also did significant cleanup, removing features that had crept in from other projects and keeping the operating system focused on its core purpose: network infrastructure, not consumer applications. All 154 project files are publicly available at github.com/NetworkTheoryAppliedResearchInstitute/os.

Agrinet: Growing Food with Community-Owned Technology

Agrinet is NTARI's platform for community-supported agriculture networks — think urban farms, neighborhood gardens, and local food co-ops that want digital tools built for them, not for venture capital returns.

The project is currently in an AI training phase, teaching its systems to assist with agricultural planning using publicly available data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the USDA.

Behind the scenes, the team is also completing a migration away from Amazon's cloud database service to an open-source alternative that communities can run on their own hardware. The old system had Amazon's database wired into so many parts of the code that untangling it required careful, methodical work. The migration is expected to be complete by end of this week.

"It'll be easier to debug, and there's always people to help because of the open-source community," one volunteer contributor said. "That's one good thing about PostgreSQL."

Cofresilencioso: A New Security Research Program

NTARI has launched Cofresilencioso, its first formal security research and bug bounty program. The name — Portuguese for "silent strongbox" — reflects the program's purpose: quietly keeping community-owned technology secure.

A volunteer contributor based in NTARI's Sorocaba, Brazil node joined as the program's first participant this week, committing to publishing the program's foundational documentation and providing weekly updates on progress.

The program's launch is timed deliberately alongside SoHoLINK's approach to public release, establishing a standing process for independent security review of NTARI's software before and after it reaches communities.

Building a Pipeline from Volunteers to Local Jobs

Beyond the technical milestones, this week's activity reflected NTARI's broader vision: that the people who build cooperative technology should be among the first to benefit from it.

In a conversation this week, NTARI's Executive Director described the model: a volunteer who helps build Agrinet could later be hired by a city or co-op to maintain that system locally — keeping both the technology and the wages in the community.

"Bringing technology local and keeping it connected — that's our whole thing."

The institute is also working to expand its tools for volunteers, including evaluating expanded access to AI-assisted development software and exploring the addition of a local AI server at its Louisville office — reducing dependence on commercial cloud services in its own development process.

About NTARI

The Network Theory Applied Research Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with an active node in Sorocaba, Brazil. NTARI builds open-source, cooperative technology infrastructure as an alternative to extractive platform economies. All software is published under the AGPL-3 license, which ensures it remains free and open in perpetuity. Learn more at ntari.org.

Media Contact Executive Director, Network Theory Applied Research Institute info@ntari.org