Commonwealth Provenance Charter White Paper

Abstract

This is a white paper on doing independent provenance and a proposed first charter on doing provenance in the wider Commonwealth region. The white paper presents provenance not as a decorative certificate and not as a software portal, but as a governed relationship among a claimant, an independent issuer, an evidence record, a persistent identifier, a certificate, a verification service and a controlled lifecycle. The central proposition herein is that a reliable provenance service must be able to create a record, explain the evidence on which it rests, preserve it, verify it, correct it, dispute it, revoke it when necessary and keep its history intelligible over time.

The paper also proposes a federated Commonwealth model. Local trust offices may be established as independent offices within eligible third-party institutions and may be recognised under the international civil association known as the Peoples’ Commonwealth. Each office remains locally accountable while participating in the proposed shared charter, to be known as the Commonwealth Provenance Framework, including a shared registry namespace, minimum standards, good-governance practices and recognition arrangements. The model is intended to help makers, creators, producers, collectors, institutions and exporters carry trustworthy records across the wide Commonwealth markets and other cross-border markets without pretending that a private office is a government authority.

The proposed first charter contains thirteen articles covering the issuer role, the service purchased by a client, minimum technical components, Commonwealth-wide registers, authorised registrars, evidence classes, the record lifecycle, owner and location mechanics, minimum certificate and verification information, governance, and amendment, dispute and privacy rules. It is deliberately implementable with a structured database, an evidence vault, a certificate workflow and verification pages before any complex platform is built.