The Institute of Agency Science
Support the Institute.
The Institute is funded as a mission, not sold as a product. There is no offering to buy on this site and no commercial outcome attached to a gift; the only invitation here is to fund the mission of a neutral standards body.
The one way to support the Institute of Agency Science is to fund the Institute itself, the open standard, the validation science, the credential governance, and the published research that a neutral standards body exists to steward.
Why Fund A Neutral Standards Body
Why a neutral standards body has to be funded.
A standards body earns trust by not being for sale, and not being for sale has a cost. The Institute is being built to hold the authority to publish null, negative, or unfavorable findings about any method or instrument, including its own, and to refuse abusive uses of the standard by any licensee. That authority is only real if the body that holds it does not depend on the people it might rule against. Funding the Institute directly, as a mission, is how that independence is paid for.
Three things, in particular, require sustained funding:
Independence. The neutrality moat, the chartered, commercially-un-overridable power to publish a finding against the founder's own methods, is the one asset a richer competitor cannot fake. It is also the one asset that has to be funded without strings, because a string is exactly what it is built to refuse.
The validation science. AQ is built and documented; its reliability and predictive validity are not yet established. Closing that gap means independent, pre-registered validation, a calibration pilot, then a validation panel, then reference data, and that program of research is what funding pays for. It is not yet running, and no methods partner is engaged or named.
The open canon as a public good. The Lexicon, the Charter, the Agency Bill of Rights, and the working papers are intended to be released under CC-BY 4.0, free to read, cite, and adopt. A public good is, by definition, not paid for by the people who use it. It is paid for by the people who fund the body that keeps it open.
What Your Support Funds
What support funds.
Support for the Institute funds the work a standards body exists to do, and nothing outside it. There is no commercial line item here, and no part of a gift reaches a commercial brand.
- The validation program. Independent, pre-registered research to test whether AQ measures what it is designed to measure, reported on a public evidence-tier ladder.
[ Evidence tier: [hypothesis-grade] ]AQ stands today at[hypothesis-grade], built and documented, no outcome evidence earned yet; funding moves the work toward the next rung only as the published evidence buys it.
- The open canon. Keeping the Lexicon, the Charter, the Agency Bill of Rights, and the working papers open under CC-BY 4.0, free to cite and free to adopt, and keeping them maintained and agent-ready as the corpus grows.
- The credential governance. The open criteria, the registry, and the decertification authority that give the Certified Agency Engineer (CAE) credential its meaning, the governance, not the sale, of the credential.
- The published record. The open-access working-paper archive, including the null and negative findings, and the annual report on the Institute's public ten-year bet, scored openly each year toward or away.
Each of these is a function of the standards body itself. None of it is a product, and none of it is a step in a commercial funnel.
Continue: Fund the Institute
The Ask
The ask.
The one way to support the Institute is to fund the Institute itself, its mission, not a product. A gift supports the standard, the research, and the open-science infrastructure behind them, and supports nothing else. The Institute does not sell a service here, does not route support to any commercial brand, and attaches no commercial outcome, return, or benefit to a gift. You are funding a neutral standards body so it can stay neutral.
The Institute is being established as a 501(c)(3); donation mechanics are to be established at formation. Tax-deductibility depends on that filing, which is in progress, planned 501(c)(3); tax status to be confirmed at formation. Nothing on this page should be read as a present-tense claim of tax-deductible charitable status.
Continue: Fund the Institute
Where support goes, and where it does not
[ Marks: RESERVED, trademarks/credential, not an evidence claim ]
The Institute is to own the standard, the governance, the Certified Agency Engineer (CAE) credential, the research, and its own service mark. The commercial marks, the code, and the de-identified corpus are to sit with a separate holding entity, and the software that administers the standard is to be built and operated by that separate entity, not by the Institute. Support given here funds the standards body and its mission; it does not fund, and cannot be routed to, the commercial businesses built on the standard.
This boundary is stated plainly because it is itself the point: the body that sets the standard does not own the businesses built on it, and the money that keeps the body neutral is kept separate from the money those businesses make.