Who it is for
Organisations with a product or a platform to integrate a transport into, and an engineering team to do it: typically mid-sized, with a stack of their own and a vertical in mind. The use cases describe the five doors; a pilot walks through one of them with a real workload behind it.
What a pilot receives
- A pinned release: a signed tag and a manifest that names every file, so a result can be tied to the bytes that produced it.
- The documentation, the conformance test vectors and the protocol fixtures.
- A named engineering contact and a direct issue-reporting channel.
- Integration materials and, where the work needs them, prerelease components.
- A seat at the working group’s table when it charters.
What a pilot gives back
- A real deployment: the release inside the stack it was chosen for, not a demonstration.
- Measurements sealed as a record on the Proving Grounds: the claim written down before the run, the files fingerprinted, the result tied to the exact release.
- A written report the working group can read, including what did not work.
- Candour. A refutation is data, and a pilot that refutes a claim has done its job.
The sequence
- The challenge. The benchmarks are published as sealed records against a pinned release, and the public is invited to reproduce or refute them on the Proving Grounds.
- The pilot. An organisation runs that release on its own stack, with the Foundation alongside, and seals its own record.
- The working group. The pilots that hold form the working group around the standard: the first partners for certified distribution and for integration into larger platforms.
- Certification.The conformance marks become a programme the working group administers with the Foundation, and its members carry the protocol’s optimisation and development within the community.
How to apply
Write to the Foundation through its engagement page, which keeps a commercial door for exactly this, or to legal@sovfound.org. Describe the organisation, the stack, the vertical, the release you would run, the intended use, and whether the work is research, evaluation, commercial or production. The request is then routed to the right pathway.