Version 0.9 · draft for review
The Transmission Standard
135 clauses governing what is recorded, by whom, on what terms, and — at least as importantly — what the register is forbidden to do. It is a draft. It binds nobody until version 1.0, and 1.0 does not publish until a conformance trial has been completed and its findings published, including the failures.
The test everything turns on
§15.2. A Practice Record conforms when a competent practitioner of the same trade, who never met the Master and took no part in the Transmission, could attempt the Practice from the Practice Record alone. Headings, checkboxes and observable outcomes do not meet this test.
That requirement is written down and has never been met, because no record has yet been made. Whether it can be met, at a cost a working shop can carry, is what the conformance trial exists to establish.
Constraints the register accepts
What the Standard forbids the registrar to do
Most of the Standard's force is directed inward. It forecloses the obvious ways a register of this kind goes wrong, and it forecloses them before there is any revenue to be tempted by.
No scoring, no ranking, no certification. The only judgment recorded anywhere is the master's own, recorded as the master's. The register states that a transmission occurred and who attested it.
No assessment for a payer. An assessment may not be altered, withheld, delayed or accelerated on account of any payment, and may not be supplied privately to a paying party before it is published. A register that assesses for a payer is a register that will be read as assessing for a payer.
No paywall on the corpus. Public fields export in full every day. Independent parties are invited to hold complete mirrors. The corpus is share-alike licensed so that it may be copied, amended, translated and mirrored without permission.
No secrets held as records. A method nobody may follow preserves nothing. A sponsor may permanently seal its own drawings, tolerances, formulations and customer information, and a record may publish without naming the sponsor, the master or the place of work — but a method cannot be recorded and kept.
No charge for standing, ever. Participation in the trial is free, and carries no charge at any later date. That is a requirement of the published Standard rather than an introductory offer.
No health or care work. Outside the Standard entirely, as a hard exclusion rather than a matter for case-by-case judgment.
Recent versions
| Version | What changed |
|---|---|
| 0.9 | Added the Trade Register: permanent identifiers, resolving variant labels, an explicit occupation-code crosswalk in which an absent code is a finding, a proposal route, and publication of rejected proposals. A trade is no longer named in free text. |
| 0.8 | Repaired a deadlock that made version 1.0 unreachable, and defined the conformance trial. |
| 0.7 | Composition floor: one free record for every sponsored one, with concentration caps, so that the corpus cannot become a catalogue of whoever paid. |
| 0.6 | Four intellectual-property defects closed, chain of title to the corpus among them. |
The full change log is Annex I of the Standard. A tracked-changes redline against v0.8 is available for readers following the drafting.