Governance
Who writes this, and who can change it
A standard is only worth what its governance is worth. Here is the conflict of interest, stated first, and the mechanism meant to contain it.
Disclosure
This standard was written by Master Joe Phillips, who also builds AIEmpl.com, a commercial platform in this category. That is a real conflict of interest and it is stated here rather than discovered later. He also wrote the companion book, whose digital editions are given away: it explains this standard and does not extend it.
Three commitments follow from it, and all three are structural rather than promised. This standard does not certify products and does not score vendors, and under HWF-71 the author’s platform can never claim conformance — a deployment can, a platform cannot. The license is irrevocable, so the text cannot be pulled back behind a product. And the normative text moves without the author’s vote: the Editor drafts and argues, and does not vote. That independence is designed into the structure and comes into force in stages — editorial custody until the freeze on September 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC, an immovable text from that date except through the process described here, and collegiate authority once a Board is seated with quorum. Designed today; achieved when the seats are filled.
A standard authored by a vendor and judged by nobody is a specification sheet with a formal name. The mechanism below is what is meant to keep this one from becoming that.
Model
Editor and Review Board
The Editor writes, proposes and decides everything editorial. From the freeze, the normative text changes only by vote of the Board — and the Editor has a voice, not a vote. Until the freeze, the Candidate is a working draft under the Editor’s custody, and its drafting history is public, commit by commit, in the repository.
That single rule is what makes the disclosure above worth anything: the author holds the largest commercial interest in the room. Until the freeze he holds editorial custody, and says so; from the freeze he cannot move the standard — only persuade the people who will be able to, once the Board exists.
The second guarantee is the license. The standard is published under CC BY-SA 4.0: anyone may cite, embed, translate or build on it, and any modified version must stay open under the same terms. A fork can exist; a closed fork cannot. License terms.
Standard Review Board
The nine seats
One per discipline, and each one blocks a different way this standard could fail.
HR / People
Open
Protects
That the HR-to-AI translation is not a caricature, and that the Human and Adapted layers of the matrix stay honest.
Operations or finance executive who has deployed AI
Open
Protects
That the standard is something a real company can actually comply with, not only something elegant to read.
AI engineering
Open
Protects
That the nine properties and the controls are technically honest and implementable.
Security and risk
Open
Protects
Least privilege, auditability, incident handling and the kill switch: the governance domain.
Legal and labor
Open
Protects
The boundary that says this is not an employee in any legal sense. It is the line where the category is most likely to burn.
Workers’ representation
Open
Protects
The floor of HWF-02 and HWF-03: that reserved decisions stay human and that impact assessments consult workers before the transformation, not after it. Works-council or union floor experience, not a theorist.
Affected persons and civil society
Open
Protects
That the rights of HWF-04 work as mechanisms rather than words: explanation, correction, contest and redress. Someone who operates recourse in the real world — ombudsman, consumer protection, appeals practice.
Accessibility and inclusion
Open
Protects
The accessibility constraint of HWF-01 and the vulnerable-people factor of HWF-51 and HWF-02. A practitioner of accessible systems, not an auditor of documents.
Independent academic
Open
Protects
The evidence base: that the standard’s claims survive contact with research, and that its sources stay honest. Organizational theory, labor economics or human-computer interaction, with no commercial stake in the category.
Constraints
The hard rules
- 01
A majority of the Board must be people currently operating in the field — deploying, building or governing hybrid workforces. Skin in the game is a requirement for this Board, not a disqualifier: what disqualifies is hidden interest, never interest.
- 02
Commercial interest in the category — the author’s competitors included — may hold at most two of the nine seats, each with a published disclosure and recusal from any vote where the interest is direct — directness judged by the non-conflicted seats, never by the member. The Board is neither a vendor lobby nor a vendor blacklist.
- 03
Compensated transparently or not at all: an identical, published honorarium from disclosed sources. Unpaid seats select for people who can afford to donate time; hidden pay selects for people someone else is paying. Both are capture — transparency is the control.
- 04
Each member publishes their own disclosure, exactly as the Editor does.
- 05
Twelve-month renewable terms, so that leaving is ordinary rather than a scandal.
- 06
A vote is valid only with two thirds of the filled seats participating, and no vote is valid with fewer than five seats filled. Normative changes carry with a majority of all seats, not of those present, and ratification of a version requires two thirds of all seats. Minutes are published, and a minority opinion is published in full in the changelog — a dissent the public can read is worth more than a unanimity it cannot check.
- 07
Seats are filled by public nomination: candidacies and their disclosures are published for at least thirty days before seating. Until five seats are filled, an unopposed published candidacy is seated after its thirty days; from the sixth seat on, seating requires majority approval of the sitting Board. The Editor may propose candidates; the Editor appoints nobody.
- 08
Note and doctrine revisions made between versions are tabled at each Board meeting, and any of them may be reversed by simple majority. The notes are the Editor’s channel; the Board holds the door.
- 09
The Editor serves until resignation or removal by two thirds of all seats, and the Board appoints the successor. The founder wrote the standard; the office outlives him.
Amendment
How the standard changes
- 01
Anyone proposes a change, publicly, with the reasoning and the case that motivated it.
- 02
The Editor responds within ninety days: a drafted amendment or a reasoned decline, both published.
- 03
A decline is not a veto. Any three Board members may sponsor a proposal directly to consultation and vote, without an Editor draft.
- 04
Public consultation runs for at least thirty days before any vote on normative text.
- 05
The Board votes under the Board rules: normative changes carry with a majority of all seats — and the Editor has a voice, not a vote.
- 06
The changelog records what changed, who proposed it, the vote count, and any minority opinion in full.
Where this stands today
Candidate 1.0 is a proposal by a single author. The Standard Review Board is forming and every one of the nine seats is currently open. Publishing that honestly is a deliberate choice: a standard that admits to being a proposal is more credible than one that implies an institution it does not yet have. And it stays a candidate until a Board constituted under these rules ratifies it as version 1.0 — the author cannot ratify his own standard. If one of the nine seats describes you, the invitation is open.
Mechanism
The freeze
Candidate 1.0 froze on September 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC with no Board seated — as the rule said it would, seated or not. From that moment the author stops editing the normative text — not "stops except for small corrections", but stops. A standard whose author keeps quietly patching it is not a standard; it is a personal document with pretensions. What follows is the mechanism that makes the freeze checkable rather than rhetorical, and below it the record of the one revision issued since.
What identifies the frozen version
A date and time in UTC, a version label, and a content hash of the canonical machine-readable edition, all published on this page. Release of the companion book is not the trigger: a book carries different dates by format and by market, and a normative event cannot depend on a retailer.
Errata, which never change an obligation
Typographical slips, broken links, mistranslations and factual errors in notes are recorded in a public errata register with their date. The frozen text is not edited: the register sits beside it. Anything that would alter what a deployment must do is not an erratum — it is an amendment, and amendments wait for the Board.
Emergency deprecation
If a defect in the frozen text would cause material harm — a security, legal or safety error — the Editor may deprecate the whole version, publicly and with reasons, and mark it as not to be used for new conformance claims. Deprecation is the only unilateral lever, and it is blunt on purpose: it can withdraw a version, never rewrite one. Surgical unilateral edits are exactly what the freeze exists to prevent.
If the Board never reaches quorum
The frozen text stays valid and citable, and stays Candidate. It does not silently become 1.0 through the passage of time, and it does not revert to the author. A standard nobody ratified is still a usable specification — it simply never earns the word that says a body examined it.
The asymmetry is deliberate. Withdrawing a version needs one person and a public reason; changing one needs a Board. Making it easy to stop and hard to alter is what keeps the freeze from being a pose.
Open findings — held for the Board
Findings from the Candidate 1.0 adversarial review that survived verification in part but were not amended by the Editor alone. They are published rather than filed, because a standard that hides its known gaps is marketing: each is Board agenda, and each stays listed here until a version resolves it.
- A legal floor for the risk classification: uses prohibited or enumerated as high-risk by applicable law should enter the corresponding tier as a floor the seven factors may raise but never lower.
- Independent balancing of explanation withholdings: where data-protection law applies, trade-secret material goes to an authority or court for balancing (CJEU C-203/22) — the recorded withholding of HWF-04 is this standard’s mechanism, not a discharge of that law.
- A materiality test with worked examples for the reserved subjects of HWF-02, so that routine operations touching reserved accounts are distinguishable from reserved decisions.
- An intake clause: a complaint channel, a response window and a severity-graded incident process with a named owner, as preconditions of go-live — the rights of HWF-04 need a door to knock on.
- A defined source for the escalation-quality metrics: a sampled review of non-escalated cases with a minimum rate and a named reviewer set by risk class, so that zero reported misses means something.
- Cross-references to statutory impact assessments — EU AI Act Article 27’s fundamental-rights assessment and analogous regimes — stating expressly that HWF-03 does not discharge them.
- Missed Escalation Rate normalized by audit sampling depth, reported as a pair, with severity grading by a party independent of the review budget it justifies.
- Aggregate-only computation of scorecard metrics that touch named humans, with individual-level access gated under HWF-42’s new-purpose test.