Imagine a digital world where you can verify people are real and every connection is genuine. Where your data lives in a vault you control — not on someone else's servers. Where communities own the tools they need to govern themselves in the ways they want to help their members flourish. Where the technology is designed to support your wellbeing and then get out of your way.
Imagine that this infrastructure is a commons — built collaboratively, held in trust for future generations, and owned by the people who use it. Not by billionaires. Not by venture capital. By us.
That's PLANET — the system we're building right now.
“PLANET is certainly timely and potentially significant. We need better design principles to navigate these troubled times, with the emphasis on decentralised distribution rather than enshittified extraction!”
Jonathon Porritt
PLANET is a personal data vault and trust network client built on the First Person Project's infrastructure — decentralised identifiers, verifiable credentials, and end-to-end encrypted private channels. Decades of foundational work is now coming together and being assembled into a practical tool people can use.
Your vault stores your identity, contacts, documents, and photos — encrypted, on your device and fully portable. No company controls it.
The network connects you to real people through verifiable trust relationships. Everyone on PLANET is invited by someone real. Trust builds naturally through everyday interactions — messaging, introductions and vouches.
Contacts, chat, blogs, introductions, and community tools build on the underlying trust infrastructure to deliver secure, reliable functionality — thanks to the cryptographically verifiable trust architecture. Developers can design and launch new apps on the same infrastructure.
PLANET is owned and governed by the members of The Open Co-op. Every member has a vote. Every penny is transparent. As a member you can feedback on the current product and help decide what gets built.
Other projects have promised to fix the internet. So, we understand you might be sceptical. Here's what we have that they didn't:
The First Person Project — backed by the Linux Foundation,Trust Over IP, Ayra, and a global consortium — is building the protocol infrastructure. Read the latest Progress Report for more background on the tech — and why the Linux Kernel Maintainers are looking to adopt the same technology to improve their security.
The Open Co-op has been championing cooperative ownership and designing collaborative infrastructure since 2004. PLANET is the culmination of two decades of work on decentralised identity, trust networks, and the regenerative economy.
Every penny that comes in and goes out of The Open Co-op is visible on Open Collective. Every decision is documented. Every line of code is open source.
No investors expecting returns. No board optimising for exit. No future in which the incentives flip against the users. The Open Co-op is structurally incapable of enshittification.
We're not building for a hypothetical audience — the communities exist and we know how to reach them. We've already mapped 80,000 organisations in the regenerative economy through CoBot. 30,000 of them are already discoverable through Murmurations.
PLANET is being built by a community — people who share the vision and want to contribute what they can.
We're targeting a beta launch in late 2026. Between now and then, there's a lot to build.
Right now, we're:
Specifying the user flows and prototyping the apps to make PLANET something people will actually want to use every day.
Coded prototypes of the vault, contacts, chat, blogs, and other apps that will plug into the trust infrastructure when it's ready. Check out the demos!
Gathering early adopters, contributors, and founding communities so we launch with real momentum, not an empty network.
Developing our funding and governance models that will grow with the membership, so that by the time PLANET launches, we have a mature, democratic organisation.
We need people who can design, code, write, organise, strategise, test, translate, spread the word, and who want to be part of a new, regenerative economy built on trust.
When you join, you get access to The Open Co-op's Collaboration Station — a live workspace where you can see what's happening, pick up tasks, log contributions, and watch the project come together in real time alongside other members.
Join The Open Co-op and become part of the founding generation of PLANET. Whether you contribute code, ideas, community connections, or financial support — every member gets the same voice.
Join The Open Co-op →