Product Vision · January 2026
Where Villages Connect
Closer is evolving from a platform into something more ambitious: a federation where regenerative communities can find each other, trust each other, and coordinate resources across boundaries. Here's where we're going.
The Scarcity Thesis
We are entering an era of radical abundance. AGI writes code. Fusion provides energy. Compute follows energy. The technical constraints that shaped the twentieth century are dissolving.
But three things remain stubbornly scarce:
Trust
You can't prompt your way to genuine human connection. Trust is built through time, presence, and lived experience. It cannot be manufactured.
Land
The planet isn't making more of it. Communities that steward land well—regenerating rather than extracting—will be the scarce resource of the coming decades.
Coordination
The social infrastructure that allows communities to find each other, share resources, and make collective decisions. This is the bottleneck for regenerative transition.
v4: The Architecture
Closer v4 introduces three interconnected layers. Each can operate independently, but together they create something larger than the sum of their parts.
Physical Nodes
Land-based projects running Closer software: ecovillages, co-living spaces, regenerative farms. Each manages its own bookings, events, memberships, and governance.
Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal is the first. There will be hundreds.
Trust Networks
Distributed communities that curate membership based on shared values, not geography. They issue portable credentials—passports—that travel with individuals across physical nodes.
A Nomad Farm member arriving at TDF carries reputation from their home network.
Federation Hubs
The connective tissue. api.closer.earth is the first hub—it coordinates passport lookups, syncs credentials across communities, and enables cross-network discovery.
But the architecture is federated: any community can become a hub. The protocol is the product, not the server.
AI Agents
Each community can run an AI agent that serves as its collective memory—ingesting governance documents, meeting transcripts, and community knowledge.
These agents don't replace human governance. They make it more accessible.
Your Passport
The passport is the portable identity layer that travels with you across the Closer network. It carries your credentials, reputation, and access rights from community to community.
Credentials
Citizenships, memberships, skills, attestations from trusted networks
Presence History
Verified stays across communities—proof you were actually there
Participation Record
Nights stayed, contributions made, vouches received—real primitives, not abstract scores
Sweat Equity
Hours contributed, skills offered—proof of work for the commons
Privacy by Design
Your data is yours. Email addresses are hashed before any cross-server queries. Data sharing between servers is opt-in only. You control what other communities can see about you.
The Timeline
Building the coordination infrastructure for shared abundance.
Passport Foundation
- ·Passport data schema & email hash lookup
- ·Consent management system
- ·Basic cross-server sync protocol
- ·Federation hub at api.closer.earth
Identity & Benefits
- ·Closer Login button for all communities
- ·Passport display UI components
- ·Benefit evaluation engine
- ·AI Agent framework & knowledge base
Reputation & Governance
- ·Multi-credential support
- ·Presence history sync (Proof of Presence)
- ·Reputation aggregation across communities
- ·Governance proposals & voting system
Federation Expansion
- ·Application marketplace launch
- ·Multi-hub federation architecture
- ·Regional nodes & backup/failover
- ·Third-party developer program
Web3 Evolution
- ·ZK-proof credential verification
- ·On-chain credential minting (Celo)
- ·Full Web3 passport upgrade path
- ·50+ villages, 10,000+ passport holders
Looking Ahead
The Long View
We're building infrastructure for the next fifty years. Here's what the network could look like.
2027
The network takes shape
Cross-community stays become normal. Your passport works at dozens of villages. Trust networks issue credentials that actually mean something.
50
villages
10,000
passports
2030
Federation goes global
Multiple federation hubs operate across continents. Regional nodes. Thematic networks. The phrase "regenerative nomad" has infrastructure to support it.
500
villages
100,000
passports
2035
The default layer
The coordination infrastructure for land-based regenerative projects worldwide. AGI writes the code; humans govern the trust.
1,000+
villages
1M+
passports
Why Federation Matters
No single point of capture
Villages don't pay rent to a platform. They run their own nodes. If api.closer.earth disappeared tomorrow, communities would still function—they'd just lose cross-network discovery until another hub emerged.
Trust is the real asset
The passport system creates a trust graph—who has stayed where, who vouches for whom, which networks have agreements with which spaces. This graph can't be copied by a competitor because it's built through lived experience across physical places.
Network effects without lock-in
More villages in the network means more places your passport works, which means more value in holding credentials. But any community can fork, run their own hub, or leave. The network effects come from coordination value, not switching costs.
On governance tokens: As the federation grows, launching a $CLOSER governance token could become a path for coordinating network-wide decisions and funding commons infrastructure. This remains a future consideration, not a current commitment.
This isn't a pitch for a startup. It's an invitation to build the commons together.
AGI writes the code. Humans govern the trust. Physical places connected by digital commons.