What this is not
Version 0.1 · Status: EXPERIMENTAL
Twenty things this project refuses to become — including when it would be popular, profitable, or easy.
Most projects like this drift into one of them. Naming them in advance is what makes the drift visible, and what gives anyone grounds to object when it starts.
The numbering is stable. Other documents and code cite these by number.
The short version
The twenty fall into five kinds:
| Kind | Numbers |
|---|---|
| It does not judge quality | 1, 2, 4, 5, 12, 15, 18 |
| It does not own anything | 6, 8, 16, 20 |
| It is not an authority | 3, 13, 14, 7 |
| It is not in the way of running systems | 9, 10 |
| It is not finished, and does not recruit | 11, 17, 19 |
The twenty
1. Not a certification authority. Nothing here certifies anything. The record describes what the evidence shows. Where something was tested by an outside party, the record names who tested it and how — and that is a fact, not a seal of approval.
2. Not a trust score. A project's standing is a profile, never one number. Written down, built, checked by outsiders — these are kept apart on purpose, because collapsing them destroys the information. Any future interface that renders a single headline score violates this document.
3. Not a standards body. At version 0.1, nothing here is a standard. Connection points are experiments. Even once they settle, they are conventions used by this Commons — not accredited standards.
4. Not an endorsement service. Being listed means a project said something about itself. It signals participation, not quality (CHARTER.md §8).
5. Not a marketplace ranking. There is no leaderboard. Views can sort by what projects declared and how well evidenced it is — never by popularity, followers, or engagement.
6. Not an ownership registry. Recording that a project exists, or that someone built something first, records history. It grants no ownership of names, ideas, connection points, or territory (GOVERNANCE.md §7).
7. Not a tribunal for who copied whom. Two projects overlapping does not mean one came from the other. Disputes preserve specific, checkable facts — a date, a phrase, a repository history. This project does not rule on who had an idea first.
8. Not an obligation to build anything. No project must implement anything, ever. The will-you-build-it vote (GOVERNANCE.md §4) exists so approval cannot manufacture an obligation.
9. Not in the path of any running system. This coordinates records about systems. It sits in nobody's execution path, and none of the formats here carry live authority over anything.
10. Not a replacement for a project's own governance. Projects govern themselves. This governs only the shared record.
11. Not a finished map of the field. The current vocabulary is a hypothesis (CHARTER.md §9). Treating it as settled — encoding the founder's present understanding as though outsiders had already confirmed it — is a way this project fails, not a milestone it reaches.
12. Not an accreditation authority. Close to certification, but distinct: this accredits no evaluator, auditor, or reviewer. Whether an evaluator was independent is a disclosed fact about a relationship, never a credential granted here.
13. Not a court. It settles no legal question, awards nothing, and issues no ruling. Disputes produce records with both sides preserved — not verdicts.
14. Not a patent registry. Patent positions are recorded (IPR-POLICY.md). Whether they are valid is neither examined nor claimed.
15. Not an investment or vendor rating service. No scores, no rankings, no recommendations, no buy signals. Comparing projects numerically is deliberately not built.
16. Not an alliance that owns its members. Being listed transfers nothing: no ownership, no authorship, no authority over the project, no obligation.
17. Not a recruitment programme for KTP. Being listed is not endorsing KTP or agreeing with how a project was mapped (CHARTER.md §11). A project may take part while contesting its own description.
18. Not proof that anything here is safe. Nothing in this record is a safety assurance. A project with excellent records may still be dangerous to deploy.
19. Not proof that similar projects copied each other. Overlap is where two things sit, not evidence one came from the other. High overlap with no evidence of transmission is independent convergence, and the record says so.
20. Not a membership organisation. No members, no dues, no tiers, no insider status. There are records, evidence, and process.
Why this document exists
Every item above is something this project could plausibly become, and several of them would make it more successful in the short term. A trust score would get shared. A certification badge would sell. A leaderboard would drive traffic.
Each one would also destroy the thing that makes the record worth reading. So they are written down here, numbered, and citable — so that drifting toward any of them is a change someone has to argue for in public, rather than something that just happens.