About
What this is, and what it is not
A register of how skilled work is done, and of who learned it from whom. It is early: the standard is at draft, no practice record has yet been made, and the trial that would establish whether the central requirement is attainable has not been run. Everything on this site is stated at the level the evidence supports.
Not this
What the register does not do
It does not assess skill. No record says anyone is good at anything. The only judgment recorded anywhere is the master's own — whether the successor performed the practice to the master's standard — and it is recorded as the master's judgment, not the register's.
It does not license anyone to practice, or certify competence. Nothing here qualifies anyone to do anything. A record states that a transmission occurred and who attested it.
It does not warrant workmanship. A lineage number on a plaque is a citation, not a guarantee. This disclaimer appears on every use of the mark and on every plaque, as the Standard requires.
It does not rank trades against each other. The published assessment measures the supply of practitioners against federal data. It is not a statement about the health, pay, dignity or worth of any trade, and a trade assessed viable is not thereby unimportant.
It does not hold secrets. A method nobody may follow preserves nothing. A sponsor may permanently seal its own proprietary material, and a record may publish anonymously, but a method cannot be recorded and kept.
It does not touch health or care work. Outside the Standard entirely.
It does not collect more than it needs. No health information, no government identifiers, no financial information, no biometrics. Places are recorded to city and state, never to a street address. No entry is made for anyone under eighteen.
Honesty about stage
Where this actually stands
| Thing | State |
|---|---|
| The assessment | Published, computed by a published rule from federal sources, re-runnable by anyone. 48 trades. |
| The Trade Register | Published at version 0.1. 65 terms with a schema and a validator. |
| The Standard | Draft, version 0.9. Binds nobody. 1.0 does not publish until the trial completes and its findings publish. |
| Practice Records held | None. This is the layer the register exists for, and it is empty. |
| The conformance trial | Open for applications. Not yet begun. |
| Whether the central requirement is attainable at acceptable cost | Unknown, and deliberately falsifiable. Two criteria are fixed in advance and published: if fewer than sixty percent of records reach depth without a second register-led interview, the design premise is wrong; if the median time from capture to ratification exceeds forty-five days, the design does not fit a working shop. |
Governance and license
The corpus, the Trade Register and the assessments are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — copy, amend, translate and mirror them without asking. The text of the Standard is deliberately not, because there is one register and a standard that forks is not a standard. Public fields export in full every day.
The Standard commits the register to hand the Standard, the mark and its governance to a separate standards body on a defined trigger, so that the body that writes the rules is not permanently the body that profits from them. That trigger is under revision and the current drafting is published rather than settled.
Root & Branch Register, Inc. Correspondence: register@rootandbranchregister.org.