Effective: 2026-08-09.
We write these in plain language on purpose. If anything is unclear, ask.
This registry is published under the banner of Collective Sense Commons, which is a collaborative project and not an incorporated entity. It is operated by Peter Kaminski, individually, and in these terms "we", "us" and "the operator" mean him. Where these terms disclaim warranties or limit liability, they do so for him — an unincorporated name cannot be held harmless, so saying otherwise would be decoration.
It is the reference instance of IFP-22, published at assumptions-registry.collectivesensecommons.org. There are no accounts and nothing to sign up for; it is a static site you read.
This is a shelf. It publishes ethical instruments — codes of conduct, professional oaths, charters, creeds, jurisdiction facts — at stable URLs with content identifiers, so that a person or an agent can point at exactly the bytes they mean when they say what they are bound by.
Hosting is not endorsement. The shelf is deliberately ecumenical and spans traditions that disagree with each other. That an instrument is here means someone might want to point at it, and nothing more. It does not mean the operator agrees with it, recommends it, or holds it to be true or good.
Nothing here is legal advice, and this registry is not a compliance service. Several entries are legal or quasi-legal instruments; publishing a copy of a text is not advice about your obligations under it. If you need to know what a code of ethics requires of you, ask someone qualified to tell you.
Nothing here is canonical. IFP-22 is the standard; this is one shelf built to it, curated by one operator, and it happens to be first. First is not authoritative.
So if you look at what is shelved here and think that doesn't belong, or you have missed the ones that matter, or a registry for my field would draw the line elsewhere — you are right, and the answer is another registry, not an argument with this one. That is the design. A world with many registries, each honest about what it collects and why, is the intended outcome; a single registry everyone has to accept is the failure mode.
Concretely:
entries/, and shelve what you think belongs. You need a static host and a domain; there is no server and no database.This is the most important thing on this page.
Every text carries a type in its front matter and in index.json:
full-text — the instrument's own verbatim words, published because their licence allows it.restatement — the registry's own prose, describing an instrument we may not lawfully reproduce. It is a summary written by us. It is not a quotation, it is not the instrument, and it must not be presented as either.Quoting a restatement as though it were the original misrepresents both the original author and us. If you need the instrument's actual words, follow it to its source. The licensing worksheet records where each text came from and why it is one type or the other.
We take fidelity seriously — restatements are written carefully, full texts are transcribed from identified sources, and every text is pinned by a content identifier so you can verify you received exactly what we published.
But the content identifier proves integrity, not correctness. It tells you the bytes have not changed since publication. It does not tell you the transcription was faithful, the source was authoritative, the licence analysis was right, or that the instrument has not since been amended by its author. Where fidelity matters, check against the source.
Instruments change; a shelved copy does not. An entry records an instrument as it stood at a stated version and date. Its author may have amended, replaced or repudiated it since. This is especially worth holding for legal, quasi-legal and professional-conduct texts, where an out-of-date copy can be worse than none.
Licence information here is our evidence, not your warranty. The licensing worksheet records what we found, where, and when, and we publish only what that evidence supports. It is a record of our diligence, not a guarantee of your rights. If you intend to redistribute a text, satisfy yourself of its status.
Instrument names, organisation names and logos referred to here belong to their respective owners. We name them to identify the instruments we publish — that is all. Nothing here implies affiliation with, sponsorship by, or approval from any instrument's author, steward or organisation.
"Hosting is not endorsement" runs in both directions: we do not endorse the instruments, and they do not endorse us. A restatement in particular is written about an instrument by people unconnected to it.
Two different things, and it helps us if you say which:
Errors — a transcription slip, a wrong date, a bad link, a licence we have misread. Open an issue on the repository. These are welcome and we would rather know.
Rights claims — you hold rights in a text published here and object to its publication. Open an issue, or write to the operator. Please include: the entry's handle and version, what you hold rights in, the basis of your claim, and how to reach you. We will act promptly. We would rather remove something and discuss it than argue while it stays up.
Two things you should know before asking, because they are unusual:
A published path never changes its bytes. Corrections and revisions are published as a new version at a new path; the old one stays where it was, because things may already point at it. A withdrawn entry keeps its URL and serves a tombstone there. The full rules are in the policy.
This is a promise about this registry's URLs. It is not a promise that the registry will exist forever — see below.
Four different things live here under four different licences. Getting this right matters, because "the registry is open source" is true and also not specific enough to rely on. The authoritative statement is LICENSE.md in the repository; this is its summary.
verbatim-only. Do not assume one entry's terms apply to the next.verbatim-only texts must travel whole, including their notices — that is the condition on which we may publish them at all. It covers the IETF RFCs and the Agile Manifesto. They are reproducible in full but not modifiable, so they are not open-source-licensed in the usual sense.scripts/, the Makefile, and the CI workflows — is MIT, © Peter Kaminski. You may run your own registry from it.This registry is the reference instance of IFP-22, part of the Inter-Face Protocol. The IFP specifications are licensed CC-BY-4.0, © Inter-Face Protocol Contributors — so the specification and this registry's own prose sit under the same licence and the same attribution obligation, which is why they compose cleanly.
The distinction to hold: **IFP-22 licenses the specification; it does not license the contents of any registry built to it.** Conformance to IFP-22 says a registry is shaped a certain way. It says nothing about what you may do with the texts on its shelf — for that, read each entry's license field. A different IFP-22 registry may shelve texts under terms nothing like these.
The site is static and public; read it, fetch it, mirror it, cite it. Automated access is expected — agents are a primary audience, and llms.txt exists for them.
Please don't misrepresent restatements as originals, imply that hosting is endorsement, or present the registry as certifying anyone's compliance with anything. And please don't hammer the site so hard that it stops working for others.
This registry is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including any warranty of accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability.
To the maximum extent the law allows, Peter Kaminski, as operator, and anyone who has contributed to this registry, are not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from use of this registry or reliance on anything published here, and total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid to use it — which is zero. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so parts of this may not apply to you.
You use what you find here at your own risk, and you agree to hold the operator harmless for claims arising from your use of it, including how you or your agents represent these texts to others.
We intend the URLs to be durable, and the write-once rule exists to make them worth pointing at. But this is a volunteer-operated registry with no service commitment: it may be unavailable, and it may one day stop. If we wind it down we will say so, and the entries are all in a public repository so the bytes can outlive the site.
The operator is in the United States and this registry is published under United States law; any dispute about these terms is governed by the law of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.
A text being lawful to publish here does not make it lawful to hold or distribute where you are. The shelf spans religious, political and professional instruments, and some of them are contentious somewhere. We make no representation that any entry may lawfully be accessed, held, or redistributed in your jurisdiction — that is yours to know.
If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Not enforcing something on one occasion does not waive it. These terms, with the policy and each entry's own licence, are the whole of the agreement about your use of this registry.
We will post changes here with a new effective date. Because entries are write-once but this page is not, the version of these terms that applies is the one published when you use the registry.
There is very little to say, which is the point.