OPEN HONEST FOUNDATION
Get involved
The Foundation exists to support a community of contributors. There are several ways to take part, depending on what you want to do.
Two open standards hold the applied work. The Slop Audit is a measuring instrument that scores a codebase and the operations around it across 18 dimensions, mapped to named compliance frameworks. The Honest Framework is a specification for writing code that is correct by construction, so that whole categories of defect cannot arise. Both are on the Standards page.
For programmers
The Honest Framework specification is complete and the Python reference implementation is nearly there. Implementations in other languages are where the next wave of work happens.
Build a language implementation. JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Go, and C# are planned. If you work in one of those, the conformance suite, which is the set of roughly 50 laws an implementation must satisfy, tells you exactly what to build. New languages are welcome too. Implementations will be certifiable as conforming once the specification has been validated, free of charge if the implementation is open source.
Improve the Python reference implementation. Bug reports, performance work, and additional examples all help.
Write tooling, examples, and documentation. Working programs that show the framework in use across application domains, whether financial, healthcare, civic, or security, are among the most useful contributions anyone can make.
Read the spec and say what is unclear. If something is hard to follow, that is a bug.
Run the Layer 1 analyzer. It is open source. Running it on your own code gives you a measurement, and a measurement is not a certified audit. The difference is set out below.
The Certified Honest Practitioner credential
A certified audit takes a certified person at every layer. The credential runs in four levels, and each level adds exactly one layer, so a person certified at a given level can run every layer up to it.
L1 Apprentice
Layer 1. The 20 indicators computed from git history, static analysis, walks of the syntax tree, and a run of the repository's own test suite.
L2 Practitioner
Layer 2. The 18 artifact inspections. This is the level the credential is named for, and it is one level of four rather than the whole credential.
L3 Lead
Layer 3. The 18 assessments made by a trained assessor against specified markers. An L3 Lead can run Layers 1 through 3, which together are Phase 0 of the program.
L3 Reviewer, L4 Architect
Layer 4, architectural synthesis. This is Phase 1, and it is earned through apprenticeship rather than through a course.
The curriculum for Phase 0 is in development. Organizations whose teams complete it can publicly use the Certified Honest Practitioner mark, licensed by the Foundation. Certification is the only part of either standard where the Foundation licenses a mark, and the Charter limits where that revenue can be used.
For organizations
Audit existing code with the Slop Audit. The standard applies to any codebase whatever its architecture or language, including codebases that will never adopt the Honest Framework. The Foundation's implementation runs in Rust or Python and scores nine languages: C, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, and TypeScript. C gets no coverage or determinism number, because C has no standard test runner or randomizer. Apache-2.0.
Adopt the Honest Framework. Apache-2.0. Adopting it gives a structural path to correctness in the code written from here on, and existing code moves across one function at a time rather than through a rewrite.
Train practitioners. The Phase 0 curriculum is in development. See the credential levels above for what each one covers.
Partner or sponsor. Institutions interested in supporting the work, hosting working groups, or contributing to the certification program can contact the Foundation directly.
For researchers and scholars
Two research lines run in parallel, and they want different people. Correctness research tests the claims the standards make. Language and thought treats a language model as an instrument pointed at language itself.
Read the registrations. The empirical work is deposited on the Open Science Framework before data collection begins. Replication, extension, and adversarial-collaboration proposals are all welcome.
Collaborate on instrument validation. The Slop Audit's construct and predictive validity studies are registered and awaiting funding. Collaborators are welcome, particularly on assessor protocols and inter-rater reliability.
Replicate or refute the transfer result. The registrations, the code, and the checkpoints are public. The cross-lingual result needs another language pair and an English-trained control, and the Foundation would rather someone else ran them.
Build a benchmark for your native language. The cross-linguistic work needs grammar test sets written by native speakers. Contributed benchmarks are released openly, and each one adds a language the research can ask questions about.
Bring a question from your own discipline. Philosophers of language, theologians, computational linguists, cognitive scientists, and scholars working across traditions are the readers this work is for.
Join a cross-traditional convening. The Foundation hosts convenings around the convergence-of-signals method, which treats agreement between independent instruments at the same boundary as support no single instrument could supply. Proceedings are released as peer-reviewable open-access publications. See Epistemology for the method.
For governance contributors
The Foundation runs on its public governance documents, and their evolution is part of the work.
Read the documents. The Governance page lists all of them, along with a plain answer to the question about what happens to the marks if the Foundation ends.
Propose amendments. Each document defines its own amendment procedure. Some sections are immutable and cannot be changed by any procedure. The rest are open to proposals through the rules written inside each document.
Join a working group. Groups will form for the certification curriculum, language implementations, and conformance testing. Applications happen through the Foundation when groups open.
Stay in touch
GitHub: github.com/openhonest
Honest Framework documentation: honestframework.software
Longer-form writing on the questions the project addresses: emusings.substack.com
Email: contact@openhonest.org
REPORTING CODE OF CONDUCT VIOLATIONS
If you have witnessed or experienced a violation of the Code of Conduct, follow the reporting procedure defined in the Code itself. The Foundation is the appeals body of record, and every enforcement action is recorded in the public registry.