Trade and craft associations
Your trade’s lineage is not written down anywhere.
An association knows who its members are. What no association holds, and no federal series records, is who taught whom — the chain by which the trade reached the people practicing it now. That chain is reconstructable today from living memory and from nothing else. This register records it, in plain files, under a license that lets you hold a complete copy.
The ask
Tell your members the register exists
That is the whole request. A member who already holds a trade files a Lineage Enrollment under §6.7: the trade, each person who taught them, the period, and an attestation from that teacher in fixed wording — or, where the teacher has died, from two people who knew the teaching at first hand. It takes minutes and it carries no fee.
| Not asked for | Why not |
|---|---|
| Money | Enrollment carries no charge, and §3.9 obliges this register to keep at least one free route to every requirement of standing, and forbids withdrawing the last one without first publishing a replacement. |
| Your member list | A member files their own Enrollment from their own address. No roster changes hands, and nothing is filed on anyone’s behalf. |
| An endorsement | The Standard is at draft and says so. Telling members a register exists is not certifying it. |
| Exclusivity | Nothing here asks an association to stop doing anything it already does, or to prefer this register to another. |
What an association gets
Four things, each of them already written into the Standard
| What | Clause | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Your trade’s terms in the Trade Register | §20.5 | A trade the register does not list is proposed and adjudicated within thirty days as a new term or a variant. A rejected proposal is published with its text and the reason. Domains are never free text (§6.8), so the term is what every Record in your trade will name. |
| A complete mirror | §17.1, §6.4 | The corpus is one plain text file per record with the schema written inside it, share-alike licensed, and hashed into a daily root you can recompute yourself. An association can hold the whole thing and verify it without our software and without our agreement. |
| Governance that leaves this company | §12.4 | At five hundred Entries in Good Standing, or on filing to register the Mark as a certification mark — whichever comes first — a separate Standards Entity MUST be constituted, with a council of at least five, a majority holding Root or Transmitting rank and no officer of the operating company. |
| The option to run it yourself | §12.5 | An association may be licensed to conduct Enrollments and Transmissions under the Standard in its own trade. Every Record still issues from the one Register, so a Lineage Number means the same thing everywhere (§3.7). |
What the register does not do. It does not assess skill, rank members, or grade work. §6.7(b) limits the Registrar to form and identity; §7.4 computes rank from the record and forbids awarding it by application, examination, payment or discretion; and §7.5 states that rank describes a documented lineage and MUST NOT be described as a measure of skill or quality. Nothing here competes with an association’s own credentials.
The register holds no records yet. It has held none at any time, and the daily digest has run over an empty set since the first day so that the anchoring history predates the first record. An association reading this is early on purpose.