About Nori
Events that turn into communities, on open infrastructure.
Nori is open-source software for people who host recurring events. It runs registration, check-in and reminders, and turns everyone who shows up into a community: discussions, Suche & Biete, member events, groups and a passport of every event attended. Under the hood, a community's data is signed and stored on open infrastructure instead of one company's database, so a community can export everything, change hosts or run Nori itself.
What Nori does
Hosts get event pages, recurring series, registration questions, approvals, tickets with one-scan check-in, door roles, reminders, morning-after recaps and emails to guests. Members get profiles with their event history, people they met, discussions, Suche & Biete, member-hosted events, groups for chapters and projects, wikis and articles, and private messages. Everything shares one membership and permission model.
Public and private spaces
Public spaces are ordinary author-signed Nostr events and can be read without an account. They form a community website with stable links, public posts, pages, events, and newsletter signup. Member spaces use encrypted planes, following the Concord protocol. Role-scoped private spaces use separate keys that are distributed only to eligible members and rotated when access changes.
System model
Relays store and forward signed events. Clients can use several relays and replace them; no individual relay is the canonical community database.
The protocol used for encrypted membership, roles, channels, invitations, messages, and durable content. Clients verify events and derive the same current state from their history.
An optional managed identity service. It allows email/password login through the standard NIP-46 remote-signing protocol. Managed keys are exportable, but the Passport operator has custody until a user moves the key elsewhere.
An optional service that maintains a community's public page. It holds the public storefront key but does not hold the keys required to read private community activity.
An optional policy-gated signer for the community owner key. New communities can place this key in service custody at creation while keeping their content keys entirely outside the service.
What is verifiable
Authorship, roles, grants, and administrative actions are signed. Each client checks whether an action came from a key with sufficient authority. Leviathan owner actions have a separate public envelope log.
What remains a trust choice
A managed Passport operator can act as its custodial users. The current Leviathan policy uses one operator and keeps founder decision authority. Multi-operator custody and quorum governance are later stages, not properties of the current version.
Identity and portability
A person's identity is a Nostr keypair. Nori supports locally held keys, browser signers, independent NIP-46 signers, and managed Passport accounts. Because events are signed by that identity rather than a Nori account ID, the same key can be used with other compatible clients. Community infrastructure is similarly separated into relays, client, signer services, media hosting, and public rendering so that each part can be operated independently.
Current status
The client, Concord library, Passport, Steward, and Leviathan are implemented, but the project remains at a very early stage. Features, protocols, and interfaces may change rapidly. This is not yet a stable release and the software should be used with appropriate caution.