I
Principles · Five and five
The “never” list is the important half.
Anyone can promise to be useful. The question is what an organisation has given up the ability to sell, and whether you can check it from outside.
Decent Mark always
- Publishes the method, the weights and every change to them, in advance.
- Shows the confidence, the sample and the workforce size beside every score.
- Gives every company a free, permanent right of reply at equal prominence.
- Requires a public document before any flag or disqualifying finding.
- Lets a company that genuinely improves recover, and says how fast.
Decent Mark never
- Takes money from a company for anything that changes how it appears. Ever.
- Publishes anything about an identifiable individual, executives included.
- Publishes a score without its confidence and its sample attached.
- Raises a flag on anonymous reports alone.
- Retains the data that would let us — or a court — identify a reporter.
II
How to check each one
Each promise names its own test.
A commitment that cannot be tested from outside is decoration. These are the artefacts an outsider can hold us to.
- The rubric is published in full and versioned, and every score names the version that produced it.
- The composite unit is on every surface, including share cards and the extension panel. A surface that cannot carry it shows no number.
- Every reply publishes verbatim with its date, including the ones that contradict us.
- Every flag string carries its source and its date inside the sentence, so it can be re-checked against the primary document rather than trusted.
- The transparency report publishes notices received, actions taken, unmasking demands resisted, money refused, and our own errors.
III
When we get it wrong
Our own mistakes publish like everything else.
Corrections are published with the date range, the number of records affected, the size of the error and the corrected figures — in the transparency report, not in a changelog nobody reads.