IOTA Field

Questions

What people ask before they engage us

Answers reviewed before they were published, with a link to the page they came from where there is one.

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The basics

What is IOTA Field?

IOTA Field is the shared architecture connecting the commercial, social, research, application, data and real-asset parts of the ecosystem. It is not a company and it holds no contracts. The professional engagements offered on this site are contracted by IOTA Sustainable Developers Canada, the for-profit entity. The community side is NODA Social Impact Foundation, a separate non-profit. The two are not subsidiaries of one another — they sit side by side inside the same architecture.

Where this comes from

Who exactly am I contracting with?

IOTA Sustainable Developers Canada. That is the entity responsible for professional services, commercial contracts, technology development and delivery. Where an engagement falls into a regulated category — accounting, tax, legal or securities — it is scoped and signed off by an appropriately licensed professional who is named on the record, and the fee for that work is quoted by them rather than by us.

Where this comes from

Who runs NODA, and is it a company?

NODA is organised as NODA Social Impact Foundation, a non-profit entity. It is responsible for community, membership, volunteering, events, education, grants, social governance and impact measurement. It is not a subsidiary of the commercial side of the ecosystem and does not exist to feed it. IOTA Sustainable Developers Canada is a separate for-profit entity handling professional engagements, and IOTA Field is the shared architecture both sit inside — not a company, and not a party to anything.

Where this comes from

What is the relationship with NODA, and does hiring you fund it?

NODA is where the practitioners come from. It is not a client of this work, and it is not funded by it as a matter of course. NODA Social Impact Foundation is an independent non-profit with its own purpose — community, events, education, grants. IOTA Sustainable Developers Canada is a for-profit entity. Being separate is the point: a community that exists to generate leads for a consultancy is not a community, and a consultancy that depends on volunteer goodwill is not a business. What connects them is that people who have demonstrated capability in one are visible when staffing the other, with their explicit and separate consent.

Where this comes from

Working with us

How does an engagement start?

With a discovery call, at no charge. It is a conversation about the shape of the problem and whether we are the right people for it — not a sales call. If we are not a fit we will say so. An engagement that should not have started costs both sides considerably more than an honest hour does. If it is a fit, the next step is a written scope: what is included, what is not, what we need from you, and how long it takes, agreed before anything is signed.

Where this comes from

Who actually does the work?

Named practitioners, drawn from the NODA Delivery Network. The usual consultancy model hires ahead of demand and then finds work for the people hired, which is what makes engagements expand past the problem they were bought to solve. We scope first and staff from a network of people whose delivery record already exists and can be checked. The delivery counts shown on that page come from settled records only, and self-dealing is excluded — nobody builds a history by trading with themselves or their own node. A member with no completed deliveries is shown honestly as a verified profile without a track record, rather than being padded.

Where this comes from

Do you work with small organisations, or only large ones?

Size is not the filter; the shape of the problem is. The work suits situations where the problem is not yet fully understood and where getting the scope right matters more than moving fast — new ventures, operating models being rebuilt, communities trying to organise economically, projects that have stalled for reasons nobody has named yet. If what you need is a well-understood task with a clear specification, you will get it done faster and cheaper elsewhere, and we will tell you that on the call.

Where this comes from

What happens if the engagement is not working?

The written scope is what makes that answerable rather than a matter of opinion. It states what is included, what is excluded, what we needed from you, and by when — so "not working" can be pointed at something specific instead of being a disagreement about impressions. Exclusions are published on every service page for that reason. What is *not* included is where expectations usually diverge, and it is the section most proposals leave out.

Where this comes from

Pricing

Why do some services show a price and others do not?

Three different reasons, and the distinction is deliberate. A service with a published starting price has been through approval, and that figure is read from the approved catalogue record rather than typed into a page. A service showing "by proposal" is either awaiting approval or genuinely bespoke, and quoting a number for it would be inventing one. A service in a regulated category shows no price at all — only the responsible licensed professional may quote a fee for regulated work, and no page, and no assistant, will give you a figure for it. This is enforced in the database rather than by convention: a regulated service carrying a price cannot be stored at all.

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Privacy and consent

Who can see my profile and my data?

Only what you have explicitly consented to, and each consent is a separate decision that does not imply the others. Appearing in the members' directory is visible to signed-in members only. Publishing a public profile creates a page anyone — including search engines — can open, and it takes effect only once an administrator has also verified the profile. Being listed on the commercial Delivery Network is a third, separate consent, because agreeing to a community profile is not agreeing to be presented to paying clients as available for hire. Private collaboration data is held separately from public profile data at the database level, not merely hidden by the interface. You can withdraw a public profile at any time.

Where this comes from

Can I leave, and what happens to my data?

Yes, at any time, and you do not need a reason. Withdrawing a public profile takes it off the public web immediately. If you are listed on the commercial Delivery Network, leaving starts a short notice period — fifteen days by default — during which new enquiries stop at once but the listing itself stays visible, so that a conversation already under way is not cut off mid-sentence. You can cancel that at any point inside the window, and there is an immediate-removal path for safety or privacy emergencies. Records of contributions you actually made remain in the ledger, because they are records of things that happened and other people's history depends on them; what is public about you is what you control.

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Money and credits

Is there a token, or will there be?

There is no token, no wallet and no crypto asset today, and nothing on this platform is an offer of one. Tokenisation is a documented possibility for 2029 at the earliest, and it is gated: it cannot proceed without a full legal architecture, a security audit, KYC and anti-money-laundering design, and a governance vote. The plan explicitly treats "we did not do it" as an acceptable outcome of that decision rather than a failure. Anyone telling you otherwise about NODA is not speaking for NODA.

Where this comes from