Commons
The work that belongs to everyone. Frameworks, workshop kits, and civic texts — released under CC BY so they can be used, adapted, and built upon without asking.
All materials are licensed CC BY 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Commercial use encouraged — just give credit. These resources are not legal advice and are provided as-is.
XSTP.epoch
A Technical Paper on global coordination requirements for 2038-class rollover events.
Developed at ITU-T Study Group 17 (formerly circulated as XSTR.epoch).
Revision 1 was agreed at the SG17 plenary held 1–10 June 2026 in Geneva
and has been transmitted to the TSB for posting. The document runs
approximately 100 pages, with a cross-sector exposure survey across
thirty sectors against the Hayes (2005/2014) infrastructure taxonomy.
It develops the case that three timekeeping events arriving within a
three-year window — the Network Time Protocol era rollover on 7 February 2036,
the overflow of 32-bit signed Unix time_t on 19 January 2038,
and the next GPS week-number rollover on 20 November 2038 — together
constitute a category of global infrastructure risk that requires
coordinated international response.
Agreed by SG17; formal ITU-T publication pending. The linked page is TLP:CLEAR background; circulated drafts remain TLP:GREEN until publication. Substantive reviewer engagement welcome before Revision 2 (December 2026).
The Hippocratic Oath of the Cybersecurity Practitioner
Primum non nocere.
An oath for practitioners — on honesty, restraint, uncertainty, stewardship, and the obligations that outlast the work itself.
Offered as a tool, not a credential.
The Friend Protocol
Principles for hard conversations among people who want to do them well.
A small set of principles that two or more people can agree to use together — so that when a difficult conversation tilts, they have somewhere to return to that does not require anyone to be the one who notices first. Nine principles plus eight annexes for the conditions that make conversations harder: asymmetry, status, time pressure, identity, capacity, state, and the seasons that are larger than any single day.
Offered as a tool, not a credential.
Knights Chess
A chess variant for thinking about decision-making when the rules themselves are unstable.
Both kings begin in check. The pieces are configured in ways that violate ordinary chess geometry. Standard rules about check and checkmate are suspended for an opening phase that ends not by move count but by the first capture — which, once made, snaps every ordinary rule immediately and fully back into force. A teaching artefact for decision-making under polycrisis conditions, debuted at ITU-T SG17 in December 2025.
Offered as a tool, not a credential.
The Meridian Protocol
A proposed Internet standard for prospective web preservation, authorized mirroring, and DNS failover. Meridian gives authors a way to authorize preservation of their sites before they go dark — with cryptographically verifiable, URL-preserving failover to live mirrors.
Early draft — seeking co-authors, implementers, and mirror operators. Get in touch if that’s you.
2038-Class Risk Exposure Matrix
A free, open framework for assessing systemic infrastructure risk (time-related or otherwise), with a complete workshop kit for running your own internal sessions.
Building on the Matrix: a CC-BY 30-minute executive briefing workshop (deck + facilitation plan) for C-level and policy audiences is in development. If you have experience facilitating in government or corporate leadership environments and want to help beta test it in a small, vetted group, contact me with a sentence or two on your context and why you can help make this framing land.
proper-css
The CSS foundation Proper Tools uses on its own properties. Fibonacci spacing, golden-ratio type scale, brand colours, typography defaults, and a handful of foundational components. Single static file, no build step, no dependencies. MIT licensed.
“proper” here means “what Proper Tools uses,” not “the proper way to do CSS.” One opinion among many.
Proof-sketches seeking collaborators
Two working proof-sketches — on the undecidability of instruction boundaries, and on the modelling limits of self-describing systems — are circulated in search of co-authors and critics. They are upstream of the citable bar set by the rest of the Commons, by design, and are gathered on their own page so the draft status travels with them.
Drafts, not results. Co-authors and reviewers welcome.