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Why a standards body
A shared vocabulary stays shared only if no implementer owns it. Concert stewards the standard; it does not operate an implementation. Certification is decided by a public, machine-runnable suite on identical terms for every implementer, under neutrality rules that bind Concert as certifier and are themselves normative.
What exists today is an interim arrangement, operated in good faith. It is not yet an independent standards body, and the governance record says so in those words.
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Why public domain, and why the schema is the source of truth
The normative artifacts – the data model as JSON Schema, the codelists, the examples – are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. Nobody needs permission to implement them. The conformance harness is Apache-2.0. The trademark and certification marks are carved out, so that a mark means one thing.
Where the prose specification and the JSON Schema disagree, the schema takes precedence over all prose. The same rule runs through this site: the object reference, the extension index and the adopter register are generated from the repository at a pinned release, not written by hand.
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Why a bootstrap clause instead of a pretend committee
The Standards Committee is not yet constituted. Referring every structural decision to a body that does not exist would defer all of them indefinitely, and several are cheaper to settle before the standard is published under a stable identifier and before the first mark issues.
So decisions in this window are taken under a published bootstrap clause and recorded as interim resolutions: in force, reasoned in writing, and reversible by the Committee on the record rather than by silent drift. A normative change also needs a stated comment period of at least fourteen days. Nothing has reached Ratified, because no Committee exists to ratify it.
The governance record sets constitution at the first external certification, a trigger chosen because it cannot be quietly deferred. A draft constitution instrument, published in the same record, proposes constituting it earlier, by appointment. Until that instrument is executed it decides nothing.
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Why two accounts
Every change to the standard arrives by pull request. One account, concertfoundation, authors changes; another, concertcustodian, reviews and merges them.
Both are operated by the same natural person. The separation is procedural, not independent: an approval records that a change was reviewed against the written process, and must not be read as independent review. The record states this rather than leaving it to be inferred from the commit history. It ends when the Committee is constituted and review passes to accounts under separate control.
The process applies from 20 August 2026. Changes before that date followed prior practice, including direct commits and administrative overrides, and are not relabelled as having followed it.
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Why Score is disclosed rather than hidden
Concert (the steward), SIGNET (the standard) and Score (the operator) are deliberately separate, and Score is named on this site as what it is: a commercial operator. Concert owns the IP and licenses it to operators, Score included. A separation between steward and operator can only be checked if the operator is visible.
Where one party holds both a stewardship role and an implementer role, the overlap is disclosed by role rather than by name. A draft interests register, which initiates when the constitution is executed, already records the steward's interests – including advising a deploying implementer and operating both repository identities – and the recusals that follow from them.
The record itself is the governance directory in the standard's repository: governance/. The decision record, including the alternatives declined and why, is being consolidated, and will be indexed on this page.