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.
Three commitments follow from it. This standard does not certify products and does not score vendors — conformance is self-declared by the organisation running the deployment. This site is not a funnel: the link to the platform above is disclosure, not an offer. And the normative text cannot be changed by its author alone.
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. The normative text changes only with a majority of the Board. The Editor’s vote is worth no more than anyone else’s in that vote.
That single rule is what makes the disclosure above worth anything: the author has a commercial interest, and the author cannot move the standard alone.
Standard Review Board
The five 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 labour
Open
Protects
The boundary that says this is not an employee in any legal sense — the line where the category is most likely to burn.
Constraints
The hard rules
- 01
Unpaid. Honorary, credited on this site. The moment there is money, there is a question about whom the Board serves.
- 02
At least two of the five seats sit outside the Editor’s commercial orbit — not customers, not employees, not suppliers. A board of the author’s friends is detectable in one search.
- 03
No member holds a competing platform. Not the Editor’s, not anyone’s. The Board is not a vendor lobby.
- 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
Changes follow a public process: anyone proposes, the Editor drafts, the Board votes, the changelog records. Four lines that are worth more than ten pages of bylaws.
Amendment
How the standard changes
- 01
Anyone proposes a change, publicly, with the reasoning and the case that motivated it.
- 02
The Editor drafts the amended clause text and publishes the draft.
- 03
The Board votes. A majority carries; the Editor holds one vote.
- 04
The changelog records what changed, who proposed it, how the Board voted and why.
Where this stands today
Version 1.0 is a proposal by a single author. The Standard Review Board is forming and every seat 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. If one of the five seats describes you, the invitation is open.