The Sovereignty Foundation · Standards
Working Groups
Collaborative development of the standards work
Working Groups are the substantive collaboration mechanism the Foundation uses to develop standards work. Each Working Group is anchored to a specific Working Draft, has a defined charter, and operates through a transparent, archived process.
Working Groups are being established. The Foundation is currently in the formation stage — chartering the first Working Group, for the AGI Standard, and identifying early participants. Chartering is proceeding; participation opens per the process the program charter defines.
Working Groups are not yet open for general participation. Chartering is proceeding — legal counsel is engaged, and formation is no longer gated on securing it. When the first charters publish, this page will describe the participation process they define. In the meantime the Working Drafts may be read, critiqued, and implemented independently at Standards, and the operating certification program is public at Certification.
The Working Group model
Each Working Group is structured around four commitments:
Transparent process. Working Group discussions are archived and published. Decisions are documented with rationale. Disagreements are recorded, not papered over.
Diverse perspective. No Working Group is drawn from a single institutional context. Each includes researchers, implementers, and ideally regulatory or civil-society voices.
Implementation-first. Requirements are validated through implementation. Specs that no one has built are treated as proposals, not requirements.
Maturity-tier discipline. Requirements are explicitly classified by maturity tier. Promotion across tiers requires evidence, not consensus alone.
Forthcoming Working Groups
AGI Standard Working Group — focused on the 11 normative requirements, the cryptographic conformance mechanism, and the mapping to EU AI Act and NIST AISI articulated gaps.
Lexicon Substrate Working Group (forthcoming) — focused on the cryptographic-substrate mechanism that underwrites conformance verification across the standards work.
Research Record Working Group (eligible) — anchored to The Research Record, ratified as a draft on 25 September 2026 and now in public review. Its work is the vocabulary itself: the terms, the publication classes, the relations that earn their place by being checked, and the boundary between a status that is derived from evidence and one that is merely asserted. The framework is deliberately ratified ahead of its own implementation, so the first task is the engineering that would make it a requirement rather than a proposal.
When Working Groups open
Working Group participation opens per the process the program charter defines. At that point this page will describe the participation process — submission requirements, charter, expected cadence, and how the Foundation will triage substantive expressions of interest.
Until then, the Working Drafts themselves are the engagement surface: they may be read, critiqued, and implemented independently, checked against the filed estate at the registry and the published research at Publications.
Standards bodies grow through external engagement, not unilateral declaration.
Registering interest
The groups are forming now, and who is in the room shapes what the standards become. Researchers, implementers, standards participants and institutions evaluating the work are all in scope, and so is disagreement — an implementation that contradicts a Working Draft is more useful to us than one that agrees with it.
Write to research@sovfound.org. Say which draft or technology you are looking at and in what capacity. There is no form and no membership tier; expressions of interest are read by the people doing the work.