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Ten minutes of orientation. After this, the section for your role stands on its own.

The shape of a community

A Railroad Network community is small and concrete: one station and the phones that can reach it.

  • The station is an ordinary computer, often a Raspberry Pi, that one person keeps running. It holds the community’s ledger: the single, signed, tamper-evident history of every payment, vouch, vote, and dispute. It is the only thing that writes that history.
  • Each member holds their own key on their own phone (or on a laptop, with the command-line wallet). The station cannot spend, vote, or speak for a member. It can only record what members have signed.
  • The organizers are the founders and whoever the community’s charter says makes decisions. In the software they are just members with a role in governance, not administrators with special powers.

There is no company in the middle, no cloud, and today no connection between communities. Federation between communities is planned, but it comes after making a single community resilient, which is where the project is now.

The five ideas

The Common. The unit of account. Balances start at zero and can go negative; that is how mutual credit works. A floor stops anyone from signing themselves too far into debt. More.

Vouching and standing. New members are vouched for by existing ones. Trade and vouches build a standing score that the software computes from the history, using one formula that no community can tune. Enough standing makes you an established member: someone who can vote and sit on a jury. More.

Settlement windows. A payment does not move balances the moment it is confirmed. It waits a day or two, during which either side can contest it. Then it settles. More.

The Charter and the log. The founders sign a charter. Every rule since is a proposal, co-signed and voted on, recorded in the same history as payments. Disputes go to a jury of three drawn by lot. More.

Offline is normal mode, running late. The station is the only thing that writes the history, but a member does not need to reach it to sign. Signed records travel later over whatever works and settle on arrival. Today that is what the command-line wallet does; the phone app still needs the station in reach to send. More.