Under the hood
For the reader who wants to check the foundations rather than take them on faith: where the standards come from, the meta-standard that makes a standard checkable at all, and the published specifications you can read in full.
The architecture
The foundations
CSIS
The Coordination Structural Integrity Suite. The structural conditions under which a coordination system holds together under pressure. CRAFT inherits its precision requirements from here.
Read the suite →Frame Language
The vocabulary discipline beneath all of it: the canonical terms a standard must use to carry its meaning intact, and the method for reaching them. It is why the standards say what they mean and mean what they say.
Read Frame Language →The meta-standard
Chains Reveal Attested Falsifiable Truth. 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.
"Garbage in, garbage out" is the input-stage version of this. CRAFT covers the whole chain, not just the front door. Its core move is legibility before refutability: you cannot refute what you cannot inspect, so a chain becomes checkable only when every stage can be read off the published specification alone, with nothing load-bearing left in a private process.
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.
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.
The full CRAFT explainer →Read the specifications
All dedicated to the public domain under CC0. Read them, implement them, build on them.