The meta-standard
CRAFT
Chains Reveal Attested Falsifiable Truth.
The standard for making a standard checkable. CROSS and WALKRI are built on it; so could a standard for any other domain be.
The problem it names
Any system that gathers information to make a decision has the same weak point: the path from the world to the decision runs through stages where a judgment can go wrong invisibly, so the final output looks sound while resting on a break upstream.
CRAFT calls this Chain of Evaluation Legibility, by analogy to chain of custody for evidence: if any hand the evidence passed through is undocumented, it is inadmissible, however genuine it is. A break at any stage of an evaluation makes the result unreliable and, worse, impossible to learn from.
"Garbage in, garbage out" is the input-stage version of this. CRAFT covers the whole chain, not just the front door.
The core move
Legibility before refutability. You cannot refute what you cannot inspect, so a chain only becomes checkable when every stage can be read off the published specification alone, with nothing load-bearing left in a private process.
The six conditions
Decision context
State the decision, the parties, the population, and what is being estimated, before any data is collected.
A technical ontology adequate to it
Define the terms precisely enough that the decision context can actually be expressed in them.
Valid measurement instruments
Use measures that actually capture what the ontology names, not labels that stand in for them.
Pre-specified criteria
Fix what counts as passing before applications open, not after the answers arrive.
Explicit decision logic
Write the rule that turns the assessment into a decision, rather than leaving it implicit in a process or in code.
Feedback with propagation
Carry what each round learns forward, so a correction at one stage reaches the stages it affects.
Why it is a meta-standard
CRAFT does not know about grants. It says what any rigorous standard must do, and a domain fills it in. CROSS is CRAFT applied to grant reporting; WALKRI is its companion for field and instrument quality. The same six conditions could ground a standard for clinical trials, academic peer review, or supply-chain integrity, each built by analyzing that field's own failure modes.
Read the CRAFT specification →