Versions

Changelog

A standard without a changelog is not a standard. Every version stays at its own permanent address so a citation made today still resolves years from now.

Candidate 1.0.1

2026-09-12Editorial revision of the English edition — issued by the Editor, pending Board ratification

Seven clauses were amended for vocabulary, not for meaning: “post” becomes “position” throughout the English edition — HWF-02, 03, 23, 41, 51, 61 and 63 in clause text, and the glossary, the WRM matrix and the HWFA alongside — and “dismissal” becomes “termination” in HWF-02. “Post” for a job is British usage that a US reader parses first as something published; “position” carries the same sense and leaves intact the distinction this standard depends on, between the position (the slot) and the role (the function). The Spanish edition is unaffected: «puesto» and «rol» already carried that distinction. Nothing a conforming deployment must do has changed.
The English edition is now written in US spelling — 176 words in the canonical text. The change is editorial: no clause changed what a conforming deployment must do. Proper nouns and quoted instruments keep the spelling of their source, so the OECD principles cited here still read as the OECD wrote them. The convention is stated in “Reading this standard”, so later amendments do not drift back into a second variant.
One erratum travels with this revision. Candidate 1.0 described its own glossary as forty-one terms; it holds forty-two, G-01 through G-42 with no gaps, and it already held forty-two at the freeze. The count is corrected here and the frozen edition keeps the wrong number, because a frozen text is not edited — the correction sits beside it. It appears in a note, never in clause text, and no obligation depends on it.
This revision was issued by the Editor without a Board, because after the freeze clause text changes require a vote and none of the nine seats is filled. It is recorded here, in the frozen record and in the commit history rather than applied quietly: the freeze exists to stop an author from patching his own text in silence, and publishing the breach is the only version of this that leaves the rule standing. Candidate 1.0 remains frozen and citable at its permanent address, hash published. A Board, once seated, may ratify, amend or reverse this revision.

Candidate 1.0

2026-08-12Frozen September 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC — pending Board ratification

Candidate 1.0: twenty-seven normative clauses in eight blocks — 0x human foundation to 7x conformance — plus the nine-property test, the WRM framework with its 120-principle matrix, the maturity model, the HWFA allocation instrument, the five-tier risk classification, the Hybrid Workforce Manager role, the transition playbooks and a forty-two-term glossary. Published bilingually, with the complete text as one machine-readable file per language.
Certification is deliberately outside the scope and does not return: the author holds a commercial interest in the category, so the standard scores no products, issues no seals, and makes conformance a self-declaration anyone can verify or refute — public scrutiny, structure instead of trust.
The front matter carries the preamble — the document’s own declaration — the author’s signed motivation and strategic objective, the thesis corrected during drafting so that it ends where every chain ends (an AI Employee holds a role; a human answers for it), and the invariant formula: the AI executes, the organization answers, a human governs.
Governance was reformed before any seat was filled: nine seats with a practitioner majority and a single academic; commercial interest capped at two seats, with disclosure and recusal judged by the non-conflicted; a transparent, identical, published honorarium; public nomination in which the Editor proposes and appoints nobody; two-thirds quorum over filled seats and normative majorities counted over all seats; Board reversal of note revisions; Editor succession and removal — and the deepest rule: the Editor has a voice, not a vote. The publication remains a candidate until a Board constituted under these rules ratifies it; the author cannot ratify his own standard.
The allocation instrument is the HWFA — formerly the Fit Score, renamed because an instrument that deliberately refuses to produce a number should not be called a Score. It runs in three stages embodying HWF-01’s order (eligibility, then risk, then economics), can answer deterministic automation — you do not need an AI Employee — and returns an argument rather than a number, because a score would let a decision already taken be laundered through arithmetic.
Clause numbers carry the architecture: the first digit names the block, block 0 is the human foundation, and HWF-01 is the supreme clause — number and rank aligned. A new clause takes the next free number in its block’s decade; a block that reaches nine clauses is asking to be split at a major version, not extended.
Candidate 1.0 was reviewed adversarially before any Board existed: twenty external recommendations and a five-advisor council with anonymous peer refutation — forty findings. Everything confirmed was amended; seven attacks died against existing text; and eight findings confirmed in part are published as open findings, Board agenda until a version resolves them — because a standard that hides its known gaps is marketing. The per-clause considerations that survived this process are recorded below.

Verifiable

The frozen record

What identifies a frozen version is a date and time in UTC, a version label and a content hash of the canonical machine-readable edition. Here they are. The hash covers the file exactly as it stood at the freeze: recompute it against the archived copy and it must match, or this page is wrong.

Candidate 1.0

2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

/1.0/standard.md · English: sha256 a88007a1b01851a5236d04abccf174b041023549d5d3cb1fe950e2c1f2161944
/1.0/estandar.md · Spanish: sha256 04ef2c5e1bb9610841cd507ff37abc86ee8059424578c0d96006a4d865897662

The revision issued after the freeze

Candidate 1.0.1 is an editorial revision of the English edition, issued after the freeze. It changes terminology and spelling and no obligation: “post” became “position”, “dismissal” became “termination”, and British spelling became US spelling. Fourteen of the twenty-seven clauses have altered citable text — seven for vocabulary, seven for spelling alone — and the archived 1.0 below is what they are checkable against. Under the rule above, clause text changes after the freeze require a Board vote, and there is no Board to hold one. The Editor issued this revision alone, and records it here rather than editing quietly — quiet patching is the exact failure the freeze was written to prevent, and a rule broken in the open is still a rule. Candidate 1.0 stays frozen, citable and archived at its own address, and the Spanish edition it froze with is unchanged. A Board, once seated, may ratify this revision, amend it or reverse it.

Record

Considerations by clause

One entry per clause: the considerations that produced it, kept after the drafting noise was stripped. This is why each clause says what it says — the part of the record a future Board will actually need.

0 · Human foundation

HWF-01: People are ends; software is a means. Resource neutrality is an allocation discipline, not a moral stance, so the constraints are lexically prior: cost optimizes inside the space that rights, dignity, safety, agency, accessibility and labor protections leave open, and never trades against them. The clause does not promise that displacement will not happen; it governs the terms, as labor law did with the tractor — and it takes precedence over every other clause.
HWF-02: Reserved decisions are a floor by subject matter, because classification is judgment and judgment can be motivated. Artificial participation — analysis, drafting, recommendation — stays legal; the decision does not. The test of deciding is operational: a human who cannot restate the case and decide otherwise is signing, not deciding. A reserved decision is Critical by definition.
HWF-03: No material transformation without a recorded human impact assessment, consulted before, not after. Its least-volunteered dimensions: deskilling — automate the junior work and stop producing seniors — and the exception load left to humans when automation absorbs the easy cases. Consultation is not consent, and no favorable conclusion is required: an assessment obliged to bless the transition would be theater.
HWF-04: Affected persons hold seven rights against the deployment. The explanation owed is operational evidence — policy, data, tools, authority — never a reasoning transcript: operational evidence is disputable, and nobody can contest a vibe. Release runs through human judgment, every withholding is recorded, and confidentiality narrows an explanation but never cancels the duty to give one the person can act on.

1 · The category

HWF-11: A role, not a persona: the position exists before its occupant, with result, authority and measurement. Before does not mean frozen — occupants reshape positions legitimately, and every reshaping is declared, because the declared position is the interface: a human colleague reads an undeclared role from the corridor; an artificial one can only read the graph.
HWF-12: The test is conjunctive in both directions. Missing one property, the system is an agent — respectable, but not an AI Employee. Exhibiting all nine in operation, it is one whatever it is called, with the burden of non-qualification on the deployer: an unwritten role contract is a governance failure, not a category exit. And breach stays inside the category — a definition that expelled violators would leave the standard with nothing to bind.
HWF-13: The status clause practices epistemic modesty: no personhood, employment relationship, consciousness or moral status is recognized — and none is denied. Non-recognition in the posture of corporate law. Every clause holds however the philosophy of mind is one day resolved, because none depends on the answer.
HWF-14: Deception is prohibited by observable results, not intentions, because intent is not auditable: passing as human; claiming feelings; signals reasonably capable of inducing false belief; optimization against recorded objectives for emotional dependency; concealed artificial involvement. Disclosure at the outset, renewed at material points. Courtesy and personalization stay legal — nothing here requires an AI Employee to write badly.

2 · Accountability

HWF-21: Exactly one accountable owner — primary, not exclusive. Supervision may be delegated, even to another AI Employee; accountability may not, because answering for an outcome requires the capacity to bear a consequence. System, data, security, vendor and director obligations survive intact, and a governance body qualifies as terminus only with an identified chair, stated decision rules and emergency capacity.
HWF-22: Chains may be deep, but they must be traversable, observable and interruptible without passing through themselves: an accountable party who must ask the pyramid for permission holds a request, not control. Scale grows only against tooling — a thousand resources without instruments is an organizational chart, not accountability.
HWF-23: Ownership is a resourced capability, not a name in a field: competence, authority, time for the span, evidence access, independence from the pressures that own the outcome, the power to suspend, training against automation bias. The kill switch is exercised on a stated cadence — never pulled is decoration — and the crumple zone is prohibited: blame follows the determinants, not the proximity.

3 · Authority and operational control

HWF-31: Authority must be explicit, limited and revocable — written before the resource operates, never inferred afterward from what it happened to do.
HWF-32: Least privilege, because access is capability and risk surface at once: more access is not more competence; it is a larger blast radius.
HWF-33: High-risk actions support human approval, with proportionality and separation of duties — whoever initiates does not approve. What counts as high-risk resolves against the classification of HWF-51, not against taste.
HWF-34: Escalate rather than improvise: a convincing answer where there should have been a raised doubt is the most dangerous failure. Every exception needs a destination — and no metric may punish the journey, because a system rewarded for fewer escalations learns silence.
HWF-35: Withholding context is a legitimate design decision in both directions — protecting the information, or preventing measurable degradation of the decision (anchoring, contamination, saturation) — and every restriction is a recorded, versioned context boundary record. Responsibility for a decision degraded by withheld context lies with whoever withheld it.

4 · Evidence and data

HWF-41: Audit reconstructs the determinants of a decision — policy, knowledge, tool results, authority, versions — not only its outcome, because a what-only audit leaves five different failures looking identical. A model’s account of its own reasoning may support the reconstruction and never substitutes for it. Materiality scales by risk class: log correlation against the version manifest is conformant for Low and Moderate positions.
HWF-42: Memory is one data system among several: inputs, outputs, tool results and derived inferences are governed whole — purpose, basis, minimization, transfers, vendor use including training, isolation, verifiable deletion. An inference the person never handed over is still their data. And the audit trail is itself such a system, governed with the same severity as the operation it audits: mining it to score employees is a new purpose requiring its own basis.
HWF-43: An identifiable version of model, policies, tools and knowledge — because without it, neither the reconstruction of HWF-41 nor the revalidation of HWF-52 has an object.
HWF-44: Performance is measured by outcomes, quality, risk and cost — never activity, hours, tokens or message volume: speed can make motion look like value.

5 · Risk and validation

HWF-51: Five tiers judged on inherent risk across seven factors — never cost of error alone, because a cheap error at scale against vulnerable people is not a cheap error. Controls lower the residual, never the class: a guardrail cannot buy a better tier. Critical always ends in a final human decision; Prohibited cannot be made conformant by any control. Interoperates with risk-based law without claiming equivalence.
HWF-52: A version is a record, not a proof: every material change revalidates before operating, at class-scaled depth — the playbook gates birth; this clause keeps the transition earned. Deterministic automation is untouched because the category excludes it. Teams add systemic risks, correlated failure above all: a hundred humans err a hundred different ways; a hundred instances of one model err identically and at once.

6 · Lifecycle

HWF-61: The commonest defect of a role contract is not bad drafting but abandonment: review carries a twelve-month ceiling, and every clocked obligation lives in one governance calendar with one named owner. Independent monitoring against the contract is the primary control; the resource’s self-report supplements it — a system whose configuration is the problem shares the blind spot. Changing the contract is always a human decision.
HWF-62: Every transition is evaluable against a baseline recorded before the change — otherwise the organization celebrates an improvement it never made — and rollback criteria are written before the results are known, because criteria written after are justification.
HWF-63: No position outlives its justification: existence is re-justified on cadence, prior to and separate from performance, because meeting every KPI in a position nobody needs is the usual anaesthetic. The weak triggers that sometimes prune human positions — a salary line, a resignation — do not exist for artificial ones, which is what accumulates digital zombies. A lapsed review restricts or suspends in proportion; retirement follows a failed justification, never a missed calendar.
HWF-64: Offboarding is as important as onboarding and almost always skipped: revoke, disable, rotate, transfer, preserve evidence — a retired position whose access survives it is risk surface with no return.

7 · Conformance

HWF-71: Conformance belongs to a deployment — never a product, platform or organization in the abstract, and the first platform bound is the author’s own. Nine published fields; full-scope assessment or the claim is styled partial; twelve-month maximum validity; the enabling claim requires a live, publicly linked customer declaration. A published declaration is an actionable commercial representation: substantiate before publishing, withdraw promptly on lapse.

Policy

Versioning policy

From the freeze, clause text changes require a version bump and a Board vote, and every frozen version stays at its own permanent address so that a citation made then still resolves in five years. Until the freeze, the Candidate is a working draft: its text may be amended under editorial custody, and the authoritative record of every amendment — date, prior text, new text and reason — is the public commit history of the repository. Notes, examples and commentary may be corrected between versions without amending the standard. The first digit of a clause number names its block, so a new clause takes the next free number inside its block’s decade — thematic order and citation stability no longer trade against each other. A block that reaches nine clauses is not asking for a tenth; it is asking to be split, and splitting blocks is major-version work for the Board. Within a version, changelog entries are drafting history in reverse chronological order: where several touch the same clause, the newest account governs and the older ones stand as record.