Foundations first, applications second
None of these applications is the point of the infrastructure—they are the return on it. Community grounds provide place, power and connectivity; the edge stack provides storage, exchange and devices; the databox provides governed relationships between the people and organisations who use them. What gets built on top is limited mainly by what the community needs: a local service, a shared knowledge asset, or a small business with no software rent.
Opportunity areas
Food & health evidence
A cooperative, evidence-graded map from everyday foods to the organ systems they may support—so databox-enabled food businesses can serve better choices without holding anyone's health record.
The first detailed area ↗Credential-gated access & membership
Concession verification, member services and device-gated entry—proof of entitlement without identity exposure.
Concession credentials ↗Local service marketplaces
Credentialed IT support, repair and care work delivered by trained residents, with portable work records.
Community IT support ↗Cooperative projects & provenance
Version-controlled real-world projects, verifiable supply chains and fair-compensation ledgers.
Cooperative projects ↗The community digital library
Part living archive, part noticeboard, part civic window—the public face of the knowledge bank.
Community library ↗Care & dependants
Delegated, revocable authority for people managing services for those who depend on their care.
Databox examples ↗Local data & AI services
Private inference against personal pods, microgrid telemetry and device fleets—run on community edge hardware.
Digital economy ↗The social web
Community-run social spaces—rooms with rules instead of one global hall—with deterministic protections for children and vulnerable people.
The social web ↗The manifold
Whatever a community builds next—standards mean it runs on every site using the same foundations.
The manifold ↗How an opportunity becomes a service
A gap the community actually feels—better food for a managed condition, affordable tech help, proof of entitlement.
The evidence, vocabulary or record formats the service needs—produced as a cooperative commons, with every contribution logged.
A local operator runs the module on the edge stack—no platform subscription, no data leaving town.
Revenue, data and capability stay in the community that produced them; the open standards mean the service interoperates beyond it.
What each opportunity stands on
None of these applications stands alone—each depends on foundations that must exist first. That ordering is the implementation sequence, not just a diagram:
| Opportunity | Foundations it requires |
|---|---|
| Digital economy | Community grounds + the edge stack—local servers, connectivity and the people to run them. |
| Cooperative projects | The digital economy layer, plus the databox exchange and the community ledger for contribution records. |
| Community library | Data safes, the databox, the knowledge-bank cooperative and the community ledger—plus device integration for physical site services. |
| Food & health evidence | Personal data safes, databox-enabled food businesses, and the shared evidence commons—each built on the layers below it. |
| The social web | Data safes and the databox, guardianship relations, local reasoning engines—and the cooperative to host the shared spaces. |
| Community IT support | Verifiable credentials for skills and checks, plus the databox for training records and receipts. |
| The manifold—whatever comes next | All of the above. That is the point: every foundation already laid makes the next application cheaper to build. |
The same layering runs the other way: every foundation that lands makes the next opportunity cheaper to build.
An honest status
Concepts with varying depth. Some areas have working artifacts—the food & health evidence map is a real, reviewed dataset and the Solid-CSS-Databox is an open-source reference implementation—while others are documented designs. Each opportunity needs its own governance, domain review and local partners before real use.