VergeCommon

VergeCommon

What if conservation could be an open-source project?

Enter VergeCommon: open tools for people caring for the places they share.

Organize a local conservation project, document the work, and make decisions together. From hedgerows and woodlots to larger landscapes, communities should be able to inspect, adapt, and improve the tools they depend on.

Early cooperative pilot. The shared website is live with browser accounts, private co-ops and scoped agent access. The repository also includes the self-hosted account/storage runtime and native participation source. This is an invitation to build and test with us. Real partner adoption and verified environmental impact have not yet been demonstrated. See current status and service coverage for what is live and what remains.

Find your first contribution

Quickstart · Contribution guide · Roadmap · Pilot checklist · Launch kit and release gates

Explore the project

Website · Conservation network · Member workspace · Account and device access · Contribute

vergecommon.com is the canonical service address. For what is live, verified and still open right now, read [STATUS.md](STATUS.md). The deployed service includes the launch foundation (PR #2) and the conversation actions and social sign-in work (PR #3). Dated deployment receipts and reviews live in docs/history/. Co-op and project publication is opt-in; member records and private land evidence retain their server-side access rules.

Start your own community

For the self-hosted application, use Node 24.19.0 and follow the single-server operator guide. It includes browser accounts, SQLite, private evidence files, device tokens, hosted MCP, deployment configuration, and backup/restore procedures. Build and exercise an isolated local instance before publishing it.

The original Cloudflare/Sites development path remains available through npm run launch with Node.js 22.13+. Its identity is a development fixture; never expose that development server publicly. In either workflow, create a co-op and follow the Start checklist. See Worldwide adoption for regional setup.

Part of the Viridis open commons

VergeCommon is one of five open projects that build on each other. Each one is useful alone; together they carry a piece of land from a map to a verified result.

How they connect: DFM finds where a corridor runs. The corridor almost always crosses property lines, so VergeCommon gives the neighbours along it a private place to organize and consent. GSIP adds soil evidence from the same ground. ViridisOS lets anyone recompute what was claimed, and Viridis Research holds the proofs those checks rest on. Viridis Conservation (viridisconservation.com) offers paid data preparation, assessments and support for teams that want help.

Built something with one of these? Add the badge and tell us in an issue, so we can link back:

[![Part of the Viridis open commons](https://img.shields.io/badge/Viridis-open%20commons-2e7d32)](https://github.com/jdhart81/hdfm-framework#part-of-the-viridis-open-commons)

Agents and MCP

Agents learning about VergeCommon can start at llms.txt (source: public/llms.txt) and AGENTS.md, which explain how to help a person start a co-op and how to contribute.

The MCP server supports local stdio and authenticated Streamable HTTP at /mcp in the self-hosted runtime. Local stdio offers public discovery and hypothetical pooling/allocation drafts. Hosted tokens with mcp:read can also read the owner's permitted workspaces; mcp:write adds bounded project, member-update, task and RSVP commands. App tokens and MCP tokens are separate scopes.

The five public discovery and planning tools work on the hosted endpoint without an account (rate limited). For private co-op tools, create a personal agent token from /account, store it in the client's secret settings, and revoke it when finished. Private access requires bearer support; OAuth is not implemented. Agents cannot approve legal/financial records, escalate membership, issue credits, execute payments, or publish public updates. The live endpoint passed initialization, private-read, bounded-write and denied-financial-command acceptance checks on September 19, 2026.

What is implemented

• Visible, online browser workspaces refresh every 30 seconds without discarding mounted drafts; permission-aware review reminders include monitoring and financial records.
• Stewardship and treasury receipts complement member payment receipts, with independent review, exact allocation reconciliation and project-bound evidence. These records do not send money.
• Guided co-op actions inside Discussion for private mapping, consent, evidence, partner participation, agreements, governance and external receipts, with role-aware choices and retained drafts. Conversation actions.
• A single-server Node runtime with durable SQLite and private evidence files, an authenticated gateway, username/password accounts, recovery codes, account export/closure, and revocable device/agent tokens.
• Boundary-derived area estimates, overlap screening, reviewed parcel-specific consent, scoped agreement coverage, stale-record detection, and withdrawal/revocation history. Pooling safeguards.
• iPhone/iPad source for authenticated member workspaces, member posts, explicit field-draft submission and deliberate photo/PDF/text evidence submission. A protected, account-bound queue retains exact retry requests through interrupted connections. Public discovery and the protected offline journal remain available; signing, device acceptance and Apple distribution are separate release steps.

• Exportable imagery jobs and an independent NDVI screening worker, with validated result imports and human review. Worker instructions.

• Private versioned GeoJSON boundaries, independent review, explicit external-search consent, Copernicus Sentinel-2 catalogue discovery, and reviewed field observations. See Monitoring.

• A member community board with shared events, capacity-aware RSVPs, private calendar downloads, project discussions, and steward moderation.

• A guided six-step co-op setup, local organization discovery links, and self-reported organization profiles.
• Single-use private invitations with expiry, revocation, and steward approval before record access.
• Country/territory and accounting currency settings, correct currency minor units, and hectares/acres/m² intake.
• Snapshot-based carbon pathway assessments with methodology references and independent human review.
• A worked payout preview before members propose and vote on their policy.
• Signed-in, durable co-op workspaces with steward/member roles and membership requests.
• Opt-in co-op/project discovery, general-region search, shareable links, updates and moderation.
• Projects, assigned conservation actions, completion records, and private parcel/consent intake.
• Private agreement submissions with independent review and externally executed instrument references.
• Private PDF/image/text uploads, SHA-256 file digests, evidence submissions and independent review; exact upload retries, cancellation, expiry and durable cleanup.
• Partner representative invitations, acceptance, own authority evidence, independent co-op review and withdrawal. This grants no extra permissions and does not independently verify an organization.
• Coarse capacity warnings and a finite reserve for authorized safety actions; ordinary additions pause before the hard limit.
• Versioned allocation-charter proposals with frozen electorates, member votes, quorum, and tallies.
• External legal authority, serialized credit holding, settlement, allocation, payment receipt, and retirement records.
• Two-person reviews, integer-cent allocations, per-co-op quantity caps, duplicate references, and linked audit history.
• Scoped JSON exports, membership removal, member exit, and workspace archival.
• The separate hypothetical /coop/ calculator and device-local /demo/ stewardship planner.

What the system does not execute

Verge Common does not form legal co-ops, execute or record deeds, certify ecological measurements, issue or transfer registry credits, initiate sales, send payments, or independently validate bank/registry receipts. Authorized people and external institutions perform those actions. The system stores their supporting records and review decisions.

The cooperative preparation and operational record workflows are implemented; direct registry and payment-provider integrations are not. A reviewed receipt means another steward recorded a review, not that a bank or registry independently authenticated it to the software. See OPERATIONS.md and COOPERATIVE_SYSTEM.md.

Local development

For a local instance of the self-hosted production build, use Node 24.19.0:

npm ci

npm run build:selfhost VERGE_DATA_DIR=/tmp/vergecommon-local-data npm run start:selfhost

Open the printed loopback URL and register a local account. Keep its recovery code privately. The data path is persistent; use a dedicated empty path for synthetic acceptance tests. Follow the operator guide for can