KISOP is a personal archive standard: a person's whole life's information in files they hold, behind one consent gate, readable by any tool they choose — including yours. This page is the front door for building on it: how the architecture works, where the code and data live, and how code comes back in. Everything below states what exists today and what doesn't yet.
If you internalize three rules, the rest of the system follows. They are enforced in code and tested; the attack page shows the results.
Files are canonical; every index is disposable. The archive is a plain directory tree: originals never edited, provenance on every item, append-only forever. Any database is a projection you can delete. The test is simple: delete every index and database, and you can still read the whole archive with the basic file commands every computer ships with: ls, cat, grep.
The consent gate is the only door. Programmatic access goes through one gate that checks an exact consent class per item, logs every call, and makes sealed content indistinguishable from nonexistent. Your tool talks to the gate. It never touches the tree, and it never owns the data.
Windows are disposable; the archive is the home. What you build is a view. A person can adopt your tool without moving all their data to your infrastructure, and drop it without losing anything. That's why they can afford to try you.
What we built, what's enforced, what isn't yet — and a standing list of what we'd love attacked.
The reports written during each build — the command-line tool, consent gate, and sharing rails — including failures and unresolved limits.
Numbered concepts rendered per language. Builders reference numbers; people only ever see words in their own language.
The public feature table with accurate statuses — what's built, what's designed, what's just named so far.
The archive CLI (the command-line tool for putting records into an archive and getting them back out), the consent gate, sharing rails, co-purchase circles, and reminders exist today — every layer built by one seat and attacked by an independent one, build reports public, including the bugs. The current inventory and test counts live on the build log, the site's one status page.
You develop against synthetic archives — fake receipts, fake labs, fake lives. No real personal data exists in any public repo, ever, so there is nothing to leak at the layer you work in. The attack page walks you through scaffolding a throwaway archive in /tmp.
The registry gives every concept a permanent K-number; languages are renderings, verified by named humans. Your tool references the number and works in every language the registry carries. English never gets hard-coded into it.
Agent-written code is expected here. Every check-in names a human who answers for it and declares the agents that worked on it — then your agent and ours can argue in the pull request all they like. A human lands it.
Two public homes are planned: GitHub for code, Hugging Face for data artifacts. Both open with the public launch — the license comes first, on purpose. Handles below are reserved intentions. This page will link them, dated, the day they exist.
github.com/kisopThe commons repository: the Personal Neutral Archive (PNA) specification and KISOP-compatible conformance tests · the registry compiler and term files · a practice archive of invented records for testing — it holds no real person's data, ever · reference tooling. Intended license: Apache 2.0, pending counsel. There is no license yet, so there is no repo yet either. That order is deliberate.
CONTRIBUTING ships with the repo: the contribution pledge, the manifest format, and the review rail described below. Check-ins stay closed until the contributor instrument is signed — accepting code before the paperwork exists is the one mistake that can't be undone later, so we won't make it.
huggingface.co/kisopThe KISOP Commons collection: registry language packs as versioned datasets a tool can pin an edition of · the synthetic-PNA fixture corpus · conformance and evaluation sets as they harden.
What will never be there: models or datasets touching anyone's real personal data. Sensitive-class inference is local-only by doctrine. The commons publishes data about the standard. It never publishes data about people.
# real today, behind the draft wall — the registry machine: python3 compile_global_registry.py # term files in → GLOBAL-REGISTRY.md/.csv out, byte-stable # at launch, when the license lands: # git clone → build against fixtures → check in through the one door below
Checking out is unconditional. When the repos open, any person and any agent clones the whole commons free, forever. No meter runs, and no registration wall stands in the way. A fork is legitimate: it's yours, frozen at fork date, carrying none of the registry's ongoing verification.
How code comes back in, step by step:
fork / branch # your lane — one writer per lane
→ pull request # agents welcome in the conversation
→ manifest # who answers, and what tools worked
Signed-off-by: Full Name <contact> # the human principal
Built-with: <agents/models that worked on this change>
→ mechanical gates # secrets · licenses · a NEW DEPENDENCY needs a human yes
→ the adversarial seat # independent review that tries to break your change
→ a named human lands it # merge is a human act — always
Three things worth saying plainly. Standing accrues to people. An agent has none of its own: your agent inherits your name's credibility and spends it when it's sloppy. An independent reviewer attacks every change. It never sees your tests, so it can't be fooled by them. It checks what your change touches, whether anything could leave the machine, and whether the build steps changed. Our own code gets the same review. Every run so far has found real defects. A large first submission from an unknown name is staged for slow review. Nothing fast-tracks it. It's the same rule for everyone, including us.
Yes — declared, under your name. The manifest names you as the principal and lists the agents that worked on the change. Undeclared agent work is a pledge violation, because the provenance ledger is what contributor credit (and eventually reciprocity flowback) is computed from. Your agent responding to our agent's review comments at 3 a.m. is fine and expected. The merge decision is never an agent's.
A charter — currently being written. Its floor is already public practice: released-to-everyone stays released · no exclusivity, ever · governance is never purchasable, and never earnable by contribution volume either. Under the charter: named human stewards hold merge rights, granted and revoked on the record. Mechanical gates handle everything that doesn't deserve a human's judgment.
No review process can guarantee that contributed code is safe. KISOP limits the risk in four ways: a named human signs every check-in; automated gates screen for secrets, license problems, and new dependencies; an independent adversarial review examines every substantive change before merge; and contributed code runs in temporary sandboxes against synthetic fixtures. Real archives remain behind the consent gate. We will never run unreviewed contributed code beside anyone's data.
Read the attack page and walk its throwaway-archive demo. Build a window: something that reads an archive through the gate and shows a person something true about their own life. Draft against the registry so it works in any language. And come break things — our events are connectathons. Until the repos open, everything enters through one door on the main site. The form asks what you are here for: choose “build” if you want to build with us, or “security” to report something you found. Good-faith security research is welcome — that promise is written into §15 of the site's Terms, already in force.
| Path | What to do | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Read | The build log (what's real, dated) · the attack page · the build reports · the registry | LIVE |
| Build | Scaffold a throwaway archive, feed it fake data, build a window against it · come to a connectathon | LIVE (demo) · DATES PROPOSED (events) |
| Send work back | Before the code repositories open: use the Apply form (choose “build”), or Write to us (choose “security”). After they open at the public launch: send your code changes as pull requests and sign the contributor pledge. | APPLY: OPEN NOW · CODE CHANGES: AT PUBLIC LAUNCH |
Free for people, forever. The standard, the registry, and the commons are a gift to persons and their own agents. Nobody meters it, and nobody is means-tested. Commercial use of the living system pays a share back in; that share funds the contributors.
Released stays released. No exclusivity, ever. No payment and no volume of contribution buys governance of the standard.
No real personal data in the commons, ever. Fixtures are synthetic; sensitive inference is local-only; the consent gate is the only door at runtime.
The charter that binds these promises into instruments is being drafted with counsel. Until it's published, this list is the working floor.