The official document of the Janus Facing Architecture (JFA), stewarded by Network Theory Applied Research Institute, Inc. (NTARI) under its bylaws §1.4(a).
JFA lets communities address the economic reality of prosumership and offers a path from exogenous, chartal money to endogenous mutual credit. It is organized into five functional layers — Substrate, Record, Covenant, Governance, and Economy & Information — each implemented in three tiers: frontend, orchestrator, and protocol.
| Official document | janus-facing-architecture.md |
| Unresolved questions | OPEN-QUESTIONS.md |
| Concepts carried from prior instruments | jfa-concept-triage-2026-08-24.md |
| Executable conformance suite | jfa-conformance-suite.py |
| Substrate under carrier constraints (P1-004, companion paper) | P1-004_Substrate-Constraints_v0.1.md |
| Prior instruments | Historical Docs/ |
The English document is authoritative. Translations are provided for reach, not for interpretation.
| Language | File |
|---|---|
| العربية (Arabic) | janus-facing-architecture.ar.md |
| Español (Spanish) | janus-facing-architecture.es.md |
| Français (French) | janus-facing-architecture.fr.md |
| हिन्दी (Hindi) | janus-facing-architecture.hi.md |
| Português (Portuguese) | janus-facing-architecture.pt.md |
| toki pona | janus-facing-architecture.tok.md |
| 中文 (Chinese) | janus-facing-architecture.zh.md |
The section of the official document titled The Lines That Cannot Be Crossed carries the twelve provisions that no conforming implementation may violate. Read it before building.
Reference implementations and instances live in their own repositories:
- Tell — the Record layer: per-operator, witnessed, append-only record
- Agrinet — federated agriculture network protocol
- SoHoLINK · Cloudy · sohocloud-protocol — Substrate layer
- lighthouse · shelter · childcare-trust-network · shanina · COER · world-chase-tag — Economy & Information layer seeds and instances
Seeds conform to the standard; the shape bends, the floors bind.
The suite is the load-bearing rung: it binds the prose to a registry of invariants with stable IDs, so the document and the registry cannot drift apart without the check failing. Standard library only, no dependencies.
python jfa-conformance-suite.py # check the document
python jfa-conformance-suite.py --list # print the invariant registry
python jfa-conformance-suite.py --doc PATH # check another copy
python jfa-conformance-suite.py --project PATH # check a repo's open-questions deliverable
python jfa-conformance-suite.py --bindings ../Cloudy [../other-repo ...]
# also report which delegated
# invariants those repos bind
--bindings scans implementation repositories you have cloned beside this one
for test functions named TestInvariant_<ID>_<Name> (with any - in the ID
written _) and marks each implementation invariant they cite as BOUND —
the binding the bylaws define in P1-001 §9.14(b). It reports that a citing test
exists; whether it passes is that repository's own CI, so the suite never
reports a delegated invariant as passing (§9.15). A test citing an unregistered
ID fails the run.
Exit code 0 when every executed check passes, 1 otherwise. Run it after any edit to the official document.
Of the 26 registered invariants, 3 are bound here at the document layer and 23 are delegated — they bind running software or a governance instrument, and can only be enforced by tests living beside that code or that instrument. They are carried in the registry with stable IDs and reported as delegated and unbound until a repo ships tests citing those IDs. A conformant repo cites the IDs; until it does, its conformance is self-attested. Reporting a delegated invariant as "checked" from here would be self-attestation wearing a test runner, so the stand-in is labeled instead.
The dispute-mechanics design — "the dispute-mechanics design" as the bylaws §1.5 defines it — and the structure and robotics articles are held in NTARI's document store and are not in this repository yet.
Two licenses, as the document's own footer states:
| What | License |
|---|---|
| The specification — the official document, its translations, and the prior instruments | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| The software — the conformance suite | AGPL-3.0 |