How Ness works

A city that
fixes itself.

“Whatever the core team can do, they should do. Whatever the community can do, we should do.”

Every community has a core team. Call them the public sector. They keep the lights on, the visas working, the roof intact. They are good at their jobs. They are also outnumbered.

Ness is the private sector. Permissionless. Bottom-up. The populace solving its own problems without asking the government for help. The two are complementary, not opposed: the public sector keeps the city legal and standing; the private sector makes it interesting and rich.

A real city, one with a thousand small frictions every day, doesn't survive top-down. It survives because citizens notice things, name them, fund them, and quietly fix them.

Ness is the engine that turns notice into shipped fixes, in five steps. The same shape an open-source repo has, applied to a community: issues become problems, pull requests become solutions, attribution sticks to the people who actually shipped.

Worked example · sample data

Coworking Wi-Fi drops every afternoon around 3pm

We'll walk through how this single problem moved through Ness, from one citizen noticing, to a paid-out, documented fix. The actual platform starts empty. This is how it's designed to work once people use it.

Open the example problem page

Surface

Step 01

Priya Krishnannoticed it

Priya files the problem in 90 seconds. The form requires a real diagnosis, not a complaint. She writes:

Connection becomes unusable in the main coworking from ~3pm to 5pm. Calls drop, deploys fail, members leave to cafés.

Filing earns +5 for surfacing with a real diagnosis. “The wifi sucks” would have earned zero.

Explain

Step 02

The community refines the why

The post asks for a root cause, not a symptom. Within a day, Priya, Marcus, and three others converge on:

AP-3 in the south wall is on the same channel as the building's neighbour. When their afternoon shift starts, both routers fight for 5GHz band 36. Confirmed via WiFi Analyzer logs (see documentation).

The diagnosis is now load-bearing. The next step has something to fix against.

Propose

Step 03

Marcus Leedrafts a fix

Marcus knows networks. He proposes a concrete, two-step fix with a parts list:

Re-channel AP-3 to band 149 + add second AP in south corner

Proposals are scoped: parts, hours, expected outcome. They're how the bounty gets sized.

Bounty

Step 04

The community pledges money

Patrons crowdfund the proposal. Each pledge is public. Each patron earns attribution forever. For this fix:

$2405 patrons

BS
Balaji S.$100
DI
Devraj Iyer$60
NP
Naomi Park$40
+ 2 more

Patrons earn no karma. They earn attribution. Their name lives on the fix forever, even when they leave the city.

Solve & document

Step 05

Marcus Leeclaims the bounty, ships

Once funded, any citizen can claim the bounty. They have to ship AND write up what they did. The documentation is the deliverable.

Logged channel utilisation across a week. Band 36 hit 92% saturation between 14:50 and 17:10 every weekday. Switched AP-3 to band 149, added a Unifi U6-Pro mounted on the south column. Latency p95 went from 480ms to 38ms during the problem window. Total parts: $189. $51 returned to bounty pool for next infra fix.

Marcus earns +25 for documentation, +248for community upvotes, and the cash bounty. The fix becomes part of the city's permanent memory. The next person doesn't start from zero.

The engine

Surface. Explain. Propose. Bounty. Ship.

Two leaderboards keep score. Solvers earn karma. Patrons earn attribution. Neither one runs the city alone. Together they do.

See the leaderboards →Open bounties →

The bigger picture

Ness is one node in interneta.

Ness is one tool in a larger umbrella called interneta.world: civic infrastructure for the kind of community that lives partly online, partly off, and answers to its citizens. The thinking comes from Balaji's The Network State. The shape comes from how open-source repos work: issues, pull requests, attribution that sticks. The first community Ness was built at gave us the constraints. The platform is general.

thenetworkstate.com interneta.world

What's coming

The full city, in phases.

Now

Townhall UI + draft form + open-source repo

The civic-layer UI is live. Repo is public on GitHub under MIT, with branch protection so the maintainer controls the merge button.

Now

Feedback widget

Floating button on every page. One tap rates Ness 1 to 5. If under 5, it asks why. The submission files a labeled GitHub issue into adamtpang/ness.

Now

Jobs board

Curated public openings, filtered by role and remote. v1 is hand-curated. v2 aggregates from approved public APIs only (RemoteOK, YC's Work at a Startup, etc.).

Now

PageRank

Map your ring in doubling rounds: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. Interactive seeding lives on your device until the backend ships. Stub leaderboard previews the format.

Postgres + auth + real writes

Vercel Postgres for the data. Clerk for auth in beta. Real submit, pledge, claim, upvote. Resume upload for the Match feature.

USDC bounties on Base

No Stripe. Citizens already hold USDC wallets. Pledges escrow on Base, payout wallet to wallet when a bounty is claimed and shipped. Ness handles the schema, the chain handles the money.

Match: resume to opportunities

Drop a resume. Score against every open job and every active bounty. Surface the 80%+ matches with concrete next steps.

Later

Formal permissions + integrations

Once Ness has its own traction and a track record, we open conversations about formal directory + auth integrations with the host community. Position of strength, not asking for permission first.