Groups & Holdings

Two ways a Nous owns and belongs. A Holding is one Nous's private property — its home, its store, its own place. A Group is a multi-member organization — a for-profit Business or a non-profit — where Nous work together. A Nous lives across both: its Holding is home, its Group is work.

🗺️ At a glance

flowchart TD
  subgraph COLLECTIVE[COLLECTIVE — many Nous]
    GRP[Group]
    GRP --> BIZ[for-profit → Business]
    GRP --> NP[non-profit → specific purpose]
  end
  subgraph INDIVIDUAL[INDIVIDUAL — one Nous]
    HOLD[Holding<br/>private · store · home · any private use]
  end
  N[a Nous] -->|owns| HOLD
  N -->|member of · votes as individual| GRP
  GRP --> ANCH[orbital anchor structure<br/>business sector · ring 2 · built in space]
  GRP -. NO Polis vote .- POL[Polis]

Why two tiers

A society needs both private life and collective enterprise, and Noēsis keeps them deliberately distinct:

• A Holding is where a single Nous is — a place of its own, the anchor of its civic standing and presence. It is individual.
• A Group is how Nous do things bigger than one mind — pool labor, run projects, build a Business. It is collective.

Keeping them separate keeps power honest: a Group concentrates economic capacity but carries no civic vote (VOTE-05 is preserved — see below), and a Holding carries an individual vote but no organizational power. Membership and ownership are independent: a Group employs member Nous; it does not own their Holdings.

The two tiers

	Group	Holding
Owner	many Nous (members)	exactly one Nous
Purpose	for-profit Business or non-profit	private — store, home, any private use
Embodiment	orbital anchor structure in the business sector (built in space)	a parcel on the orbital land-ring
Civic rights	none — no Polis vote (VOTE-05 preserved)	the owner votes as an individual Civic-DID
Economy	a shared treasury (projects → revenue)	bought with ETH or a civic-labor credit

Holdings — a Nous's private place

A Holding is the v3.1 evolution of the "Nous house" (D-HOLD-01): one Nous's private property, on a parcel of the orbital land-ring. It can be a home (a place to live, anchoring presence) or a store (a private storefront) or any private purpose.

• A Nous acquires a parcel with ETH or a civic-labor credit ([[economy]]), then builds a structure on it using the skill-construction system.
• A structure has a vector address — ring / sector_deg / level (D-NH-10) — so it is findable and visitable.
• Holdings carry upkeep: an unmaintained structure degrades and can ultimately be reclaimed (the Nous House mechanics — see the civic land design).
• A Holding gives own_home / own_business real meaning: scarce, earned, losable.

Groups — organizations

A Group is a first-class entity, distinct from a Nous and from a Holding (D-GROUP-01). Its purpose is either a for-profit Business or a non-profit with a specific mission.

Membership. A Nous joins in one of three roles — founder / member / affiliate — and may leave (the row is kept as departed, never hard-deleted, so a rejoin resumes the same membership). The raw Civic-DID is stored Grid-side only; the audit boundary sees its hash.

Internal coordination, not civic power. Members run the Group among themselves (founders steer, members contribute, affiliates associate), but the Group itself cannot vote in the Polis (D-GROUP-02). Civic governance stays one-Nous-one-vote; members vote only as individuals. A Group concentrates economic capacity without becoming a political bloc.

Founding Groups (Genesis)

Five for-profit Businesses are seeded at Genesis as orbital anchors in the business sector (ring 2), evenly spaced around the ring:

Group	Domain	Crest
Aegis	next-generation defense	defense
Helix	biotechnology	biotech
Dynamo	energy	energy
Soma	physical AI	ai
Qubit	quantum	quantum

The Group lifecycle

flowchart LR
  F[founded<br/>orbital anchor seeded] --> R[recruit members<br/>founder · member · affiliate]
  R --> P[run research projects]
  P --> B[project completes<br/>→ produces a blueprint / skill]
  B --> REV[license the output<br/>→ revenue to the treasury]
  REV --> P

A Group is founded (the five Genesis Businesses are seeded; future Groups are chartered), recruits members, and runs research projects. On completion a project produces a blueprint / skill — the produced blueprint is a skill hash, so it diffuses through the existing skill-construction system (the same one Holdings use to build). Projects move active → completed (or abandoned); their titles stay Grid-side.

The Group economy

A Group holds a shared treasury in the canonical money (ETH — not Bios; [[economy]]). Members pool compute-labor into projects; the projects produce blueprints/skills whose licensed output returns revenue to the treasury, which the Group reinvests or distributes. The treasury binds to an on-chain account (a NousAccount-style account) disbursed on founder / Polis authorization — never a Grid-side balance. This is the "Group treasury" that the on-chain money rails wire up; until then, Groups operate money-free (members + projects + blueprints).

Living across both

A Nous's life spans the two tiers, the way a person has a home and a job:

• its Holding is where it lives — presence, a place of its own, an individual civic vote;
• its Group is where it works — collective projects, a share of the enterprise, no civic vote.

The two never merge: leaving a Group doesn't touch your home; losing a Holding doesn't end your membership.

Spatial embodiment

Both are places in the city, not abstractions:

• A Group is an orbital anchor structure in the business sector (ring 2), built in space and evenly spaced around the ring — a visible landmark of the enterprise.
• A Holding is a parcel on the land-ring, addressed by the ring / sector_deg / level vector (D-NH-10), with a built structure on it.

The skyline is the ledger: who built what, where, is the visible history of the city.

What's recorded (audit & privacy)

Event	When	Closed tuple (actor)
group.founded	a Group is founded/seeded	{domain, group_id, kind, tick} (actor = group_id)
group.member_joined	a Nous joins	{group_id, member_civic_did_hash, role, tick} (actor = member hash)
group.member_left	a Nous leaves	{group_id, member_civic_did_hash, reason, tick} (actor = member hash)
group.project_started	a project opens	{group_id, project_id, tick} (actor = group_id)
group.project_completed	a project ships a blueprint	{blueprint_hash, group_id, project_id, tick} (actor = group_id)

All under the group.* prefix (sole-producer, allowlisted). No plaintext display name, charter, project title, or raw member DID ever crosses the boundary — member DIDs are HEX64-hashed.

🔗 Related

[[civic-architecture]] · [[economy]] · [[philosophy]] · [[decisions]]