Concert Foundation for Free Commerce

A steward of standards. We publish specifications, keep the public record of how they change, and maintain the tests that decide conformance.

We are not a platform, a vendor or a network. We run no implementation of the standards we steward.

We are not yet an independent standards body. Today the Foundation is run by its founding steward under published interim rules, and it says so. The route from here to a constituted Standards Committee is set out under Governance.

• Free Commerce is the idea: commerce that belongs to its participants.
• Concert Foundation is the steward: bound by published rules.
• SIGNET is the first standard: a common language for procurement.

To act in concert is to act together by agreement, each player keeping its own part. That is what a standard asks of those who use it, and it is the manifesto’s idea of interdependence in a single word.

A medieval merchant could carry a guild’s mark from one city to another and be trusted on arrival. The guild set the terms of entry, vouched for its members and kept the record.

SIGNET asks what that would take today: credentials a supplier holds for itself, rules written down where anyone can read them, and a record that no single party keeps alone.

• We will not become the platform through which everyone must trade.
• We will hold no preferential relationship with any operator.
• We will work in the open, and record what we decide and what we decline.
• We will claim only what we can show.