Neutral stewardship. Open participation.

• Concert Foundation stewards SIGNET. It runs no implementation of it.
• The Standards Committee is not yet constituted.
• Until it is, decisions are taken under a published bootstrap clause. Each is recorded as an interim resolution with written reasons, and the Committee may reverse it on the record.
• A normative change carries a comment period of at least fourteen days.
• Every change arrives by pull request. One account authors and another reviews and merges. Both are operated by the same person, so the separation is procedural, not independent.
• Nothing has been ratified, because no Committee yet exists to ratify it.
• No certification has been issued.

Three roles are kept apart so that no commercial interest can capture the standard.

• The steward – Concert Foundation publishes the specification, keeps the record of how it changes and maintains the tests.
• The standard – SIGNET is in the public domain. Anyone may implement it.
• Operators – commercial organisations build and run services on the standard. Concert holds no preferential relationship with any of them.

Four rules bind Concert when it tests an implementation:

1. Pass or fail is decided by the suite alone.
2. Every implementer is tested against the same suite, byte for byte.
3. No implementer receives early access or a privileged route.
4. Anyone can reproduce a result from the public suite.

Where the steward also holds an interest in an implementer, the overlap is disclosed by role in the interests register, with the recusals that follow from it. The register is a draft until the Committee is constituted.

One such interest is recorded today: the steward advises an implementer that is deploying the standard. Where a proposal derives from an enquiry raised by that implementer, the steward registers it but does not adopt it. Adoption is reserved to the Standards Committee, and the steward is recused from the vote.

Read the specification, change history, governance decisions and declared interests.

• The specification →
• Change history →
• Governance decisions↗ (external site)
• Declared interests↗ (external site)

None of this is in place yet.

• A Standards Committee of two members, under a draft constitution that decides nothing until it is executed. Each member is appointed after a recorded assessment against a published competency framework and is named in the role register. The steward attends and does not vote.
• Review and merge by accounts under separate control
• A move, over time, to a multi-stakeholder non-profit steward

• The schemas, codelists and examples are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0.
• The conformance harness is licensed under Apache-2.0.
• Concert Foundation administers the SIGNET name and the certification marks, so that a mark keeps one meaning.

The standard is free. The Foundation intends to sustain itself through certification fees that are published, identical for every implementer at a given level, and unrelated to the result. No certification has been issued yet.

• Comment on an open proposal during its comment period.
• Propose a change by pull request.
• Ask whether something is in scope. A scope enquiry is answered on the record, with reasons.
• Declare adoption. →