Principles
Your business should never depend on one vendor. Including us.
No organization should have to depend on a particular software vendor, including the creator of this project, to keep the identity, meaning, accepted state, relationships, governance and history of its own business. Governed Objects is designed so that applications, providers, AI systems and even runtimes can be replaced without rebuilding the business itself.
The litmus test
If a particular application, SaaS provider, AI provider, runtime implementation or commercial company disappeared, what part of your business’s identity, meaning, accepted state, governance, relationships or history would be lost?
This project aims to keep shrinking that answer.
The principles
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01
Your organization owns its identities.
A record’s lasting identity never depends on a provider’s ID. Provider IDs are links, not the record itself.
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02
Your organization owns accepted state.
Outside systems can report what they see. They cannot silently redefine what your business has accepted.
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03
History survives a vendor change.
Accepted changes become your own history, so replacing a vendor doesn’t mean rebuilding history from that vendor.
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04
Applications operate the business. They don’t own it.
Replacing an application shouldn’t mean replacing identity, history, relationships, policy or accepted state.
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05
Providers are replaceable.
SaaS systems may hold working copies of your business state. They are not the business itself.
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06
AI can ask. It doesn’t decide.
People, agents and AI models may request actions. AI reasoning never becomes the source of identity, authority, policy or truth.
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07
Authority only narrows.
Applications, agents and delegates can receive less authority than their source, never more.
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08
Meaning survives gaps.
If a provider can’t represent a field, you don’t lose it. It stays valid in your own record.
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09
Portability is more than export.
A CSV export isn’t portability. Identity, meaning, relationships, governance and history need to move too.
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10
Implementations must be replaceable too.
Governed Objects must not replace one lock-in with a new one at the runtime layer.
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11
Conformance needs no proprietary service.
Anyone can test conformance without permission from, dependence on, or access to any one company.
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12
Sovereignty is a design rule.
Every architecture, integration, commercial and governance proposal is weighed against these principles, and any tradeoff is made explicit.
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13
Upgrades keep you in control.
Moving to new versions should never require giving up your identities, history or meaning. Migrations should be explicit, inspectable and portable.
How the project is governed
- Founder-led for now. Brafford Labs, LLC maintains the specification during this early stage. That is a current-stage arrangement, not a claim to permanent control. Long-term governance is not yet decided.
- Anyone can propose changes by opening an issue in the specification repository. Proposals get a response, and the reasons for accepting or declining them are recorded.
- Conformance is open.
- Anyone can claim conformance by passing the open conformance suite, without asking permission.
- The open suite aims to test every externally observable requirement. If a paid tool ever reveals a gap, a test is added to the open suite.
- Any certification mark is optional, and would be handed to a neutral foundation if one is formed.
- Stable versions stay stable. A version labeled Final never changes. Once Final versions exist, breaking changes are announced at least 90 days ahead, with migration notes, except for urgent security fixes. Current versions are drafts and may change at any time.
- No capture. Governance should never make one vendor, one hosted service or one runtime mandatory, and size or spending alone should not buy control of the specification.
Honest status
These principles describe design intent and how we evaluate changes. Not every principle is fully realized today.
Read the full principles ↗ Read the governance ↗
Questions, or want to talk it through?
We’d like to hear what you’re building and how Governed Objects might fit.
hello@governedobjects.com