ANUKA Glossary
Draft 0.1 — 2 August 2026
This glossary is normative for Foundation documents unless a document explicitly defines a narrower meaning.
How to use this glossary
Section titled “How to use this glossary”ANUKA uses familiar words in a specific product and governance context. A term can sound obvious while carrying legal, technical, or cultural implications that differ across jurisdictions.
Each entry contains:
- Definition — the intended ANUKA meaning;
- Does not automatically mean — boundaries that prevent false claims;
- Implementation note — where the term affects product design.
When product copy, contracts, code, and Foundation documents disagree, the applicable contract and law control the legal relationship. The glossary controls only ANUKA documentation language.
Core identity and network terms
Section titled “Core identity and network terms”Definition: The shared network, open foundation, protocols, products, communities, and operating institutions organized around verified contribution and quality.
Does not automatically mean: One corporation, one application, one token, one legal entity, or a sovereign state.
Network State
Section titled “Network State”Definition: ANUKA’s long-term design horizon: a digital-first, mission-aligned community with portable identity, contribution records, economic coordination, resident products, versioned rules, and voluntary participation.
Does not automatically mean: Current sovereignty, citizenship, diplomatic recognition, taxation authority, territorial control, or governmental power.
Shared Core
Section titled “Shared Core”Definition: Reusable infrastructure common to the network, including identity, passports, contribution records, attestations, permissions, opportunities, payments, quality protocols, APIs, SDKs, CLI tools, AI skills, and governance interfaces.
Implementation note: Shared-core components should be open, modular, versioned, replaceable, and usable by independent products.
Resident
Section titled “Resident”Definition: A person, product, company, community, or agent participating in ANUKA under a declared set of network rules.
Does not automatically mean: Legal residency, immigration status, citizenship, employment, ownership, accreditation, or tax domicile.
Resident Product
Section titled “Resident Product”Definition: An independently operated product that uses part of the ANUKA shared core and declares its relationship to the network.
Does not automatically mean: A subsidiary, franchise, jointly owned company, or product controlled by ANUKA Foundation.
Resident Company
Section titled “Resident Company”Definition: A legal or operating organization participating in the network and using defined ANUKA protocols or services.
Does not automatically mean: Certification, investment endorsement, guaranteed quality, or common ownership.
Foundation
Section titled “Foundation”Definition: The public body of documentation, standards, schemas, governance rules, and reference implementations that defines the shared network layer.
Does not automatically mean: A specific nonprofit legal entity. If such an entity is formed, its legal name and role must be stated separately.
People and roles
Section titled “People and roles”Participant
Section titled “Participant”Definition: Any person or organization interacting with the network under applicable rules.
Contributor
Section titled “Contributor”Definition: A participant who supplies work, feedback, testing, data, capital, review, introductions, governance input, or another recognized form of value.
Does not automatically mean: Employee, independent contractor, volunteer, partner, co-author, owner, or fiduciary. The actual relationship depends on facts and agreements.
Product Founder
Section titled “Product Founder”Definition: A person or team responsible for establishing a resident product’s original mission, legal structure, initial assets, or operating mandate.
Does not automatically mean: Permanent unilateral control or exclusive ownership of all future contributions.
Product Steward
Section titled “Product Steward”Definition: A person, team, or agent granted bounded authority to operate or improve a defined product or domain for a declared period and purpose.
Does not automatically mean: Equity owner, director, officer, employee, fiduciary, franchisee, or unlimited administrator.
Reviewer
Section titled “Reviewer”Definition: A participant who evaluates whether evidence, work, or outcomes meet declared criteria.
Qualifier
Section titled “Qualifier”Definition: A reviewer specifically responsible for determining whether a contribution or release is ready to advance to another stage, such as testing, production, payment, or public attestation.
Attester
Section titled “Attester”Definition: An entity that signs a structured claim about a subject or event.
Does not automatically mean: Independent auditor, regulator, guarantor, or authoritative source. The value of an attestation depends on the attester, evidence, method, and context.
Verifier
Section titled “Verifier”Definition: A person or system that checks a credential, attestation, signature, schema, status, evidence policy, or source before relying on a claim.
Issuer
Section titled “Issuer”Definition: In a verifiable-credential context, the entity that makes and secures claims in a credential.
Holder
Section titled “Holder”Definition: In a verifiable-credential context, the entity that possesses and can present a credential.
Subject
Section titled “Subject”Definition: The person, product, company, contribution, metric, experiment, or event about which a claim is made.
AI Agent
Section titled “AI Agent”Definition: A software actor that can reason, call tools, access scoped data, and perform actions on behalf of an accountable person or organization.
Does not automatically mean: Legal person, employee, independent authority, or unbounded autonomous decision-maker.
Agent Principal
Section titled “Agent Principal”Definition: The accountable person or organization on whose authority an AI agent acts.
Work and opportunity terms
Section titled “Work and opportunity terms”Opportunity
Section titled “Opportunity”Definition: A published invitation to contribute toward a defined need, outcome, investigation, experiment, or role.
Bounty
Section titled “Bounty”Definition: An opportunity with a declared reward contingent on specified conditions.
Does not automatically mean: A prize legally exempt from employment, tax, securities, consumer-protection, or contractual requirements.
Application
Section titled “Application”Definition: A participant’s request to undertake an opportunity or role.
Assignment
Section titled “Assignment”Definition: A confirmed allocation of an opportunity to a participant under defined terms.
Contribution
Section titled “Contribution”Definition: A discrete, attributable input to a product, company, community, or shared core.
Examples include a hypothesis, design, pull request, test report, customer introduction, funded feature request, analysis, review, or operational change.
Acceptance Criteria
Section titled “Acceptance Criteria”Definition: Conditions used to decide whether a contribution is complete, acceptable, ready for the next stage, or eligible for payment.
Work Record
Section titled “Work Record”Definition: A structured record connecting an opportunity, participant, contribution, review, result, compensation status, and related evidence.
Stewardship Grant
Section titled “Stewardship Grant”Definition: A documented delegation of limited authority over a product or domain, including scope, powers, duration, budget, metrics, review, and termination.
Handover
Section titled “Handover”Definition: The transfer of context, access, records, obligations, and pending decisions when stewardship or operational responsibility changes.
Product and experiment terms
Section titled “Product and experiment terms”Signal
Section titled “Signal”Definition: Information suggesting a need, opportunity, risk, preference, or anomaly that may justify investigation.
A signal is not yet a validated problem or approved task.
Feedback
Section titled “Feedback”Definition: A participant’s observation, experience, request, criticism, or suggestion about a product or process.
Feature Request
Section titled “Feature Request”Definition: A proposal to add, remove, or change product behavior.
Sponsored Feature
Section titled “Sponsored Feature”Definition: A feature request for which one or more parties commit funds or another defined resource toward evaluation or delivery.
Does not automatically mean: A guaranteed release, purchase, investment, equity right, or control over the roadmap.
Hypothesis
Section titled “Hypothesis”Definition: A falsifiable expectation connecting an intervention to an observable outcome under stated conditions.
Experiment
Section titled “Experiment”Definition: A bounded intervention designed to generate evidence about a hypothesis.
Simulation
Section titled “Simulation”Definition: A model-based exploration of possible outcomes without claiming that the modeled result has occurred in the real system.
A/B Test
Section titled “A/B Test”Definition: A controlled comparison in which different audience groups receive different variants and outcomes are compared using a declared method.
Primary Metric
Section titled “Primary Metric”Definition: The main measure used to evaluate the intended effect of an experiment or contribution.
Guardrail Metric
Section titled “Guardrail Metric”Definition: A measure used to detect unacceptable side effects or trade-offs while optimizing another metric.
Baseline
Section titled “Baseline”Definition: The reference condition, period, cohort, or model against which change is evaluated.
Rollback
Section titled “Rollback”Definition: A planned method for reversing or disabling a change when results, safety, or reliability require it.
Product Backstage
Section titled “Product Backstage”Definition: A founder-controlled interface exposing selected public or permissioned information about a product’s community, roadmap, evidence, opportunities, and live activity.
Business Digital Twin
Section titled “Business Digital Twin”Definition: A data-backed model of a business used to inspect structure, simulate scenarios, navigate metrics, and coordinate decisions.
Does not automatically mean: A perfect or complete representation of the real business.
Evidence and trust terms
Section titled “Evidence and trust terms”Definition: A statement about a subject that may be true, false, incomplete, outdated, disputed, or conditional.
Evidence
Section titled “Evidence”Definition: Information offered to support, challenge, or contextualize a claim.
Provenance
Section titled “Provenance”Definition: Information about where data or a claim came from, who produced it, how it was transformed, and when.
Verification
Section titled “Verification”Definition: The process of checking specified properties of a claim, credential, attestation, source, method, or result.
Does not automatically mean: Proof of truth in every relevant sense.
Verified Result
Section titled “Verified Result”Definition: A result that has passed a declared verification policy covering source, method, identity, status, and review.
Does not automatically mean: Independent audit, scientific certainty, causation, future performance, or regulatory approval.
Attestation
Section titled “Attestation”Definition: A structured claim signed by an attester, potentially recorded onchain or offchain, with a schema and status.
Schema
Section titled “Schema”Definition: A machine-readable definition of the fields and types used in a credential, attestation, event, or evidence record.
Credential
Section titled “Credential”Definition: A set of claims issued by one entity about a subject, potentially held and presented by another entity.
Verifiable Credential
Section titled “Verifiable Credential”Definition: A credential expressed and secured according to the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model or a compatible declared standard.
Passport
Section titled “Passport”Definition: A participant-controlled or organization-controlled view that assembles selected identity, contribution, capability, status, and evidence records.
Does not automatically mean: Government-issued passport, travel document, identity card, citizenship record, credit report, or independent certification.
Trust Passport
Section titled “Trust Passport”Definition: A passport optimized for presenting relevant, reviewable evidence to a relying party such as a company, customer, partner, or investor.
Traction Passport
Section titled “Traction Passport”Definition: A company-controlled presentation of selected evidence about product adoption, revenue, retention, growth, delivery, or other business traction.
Reputation Graph
Section titled “Reputation Graph”Definition: A network of claims, attestations, contributions, relationships, reviews, outcomes, corrections, and contexts associated with a subject.
Does not automatically mean: One score, popularity ranking, or permanent judgment.
Trust Score
Section titled “Trust Score”Definition: A contextual computed summary derived from a declared evidence set and method.
Usage rule: ANUKA should prefer the more precise name of the score, such as “release-readiness confidence” or “verified commerce history,” and must expose inputs and limitations.
Social Score
Section titled “Social Score”Definition: A broad label for scoring social behavior or status.
Usage rule: Avoid in ANUKA product language because it suggests universal surveillance and coercive social-credit systems. Use contextual evidence or named purpose-specific measures instead.
Quality
Section titled “Quality”Definition: The degree to which a person, product, process, company, or system satisfies declared needs and constraints without unacceptable harm.
Quality Protocol
Section titled “Quality Protocol”Definition: A repeatable process for turning signals into reviewed and attributable learning:
signal → hypothesis → bounded action → observation → review → attestation → reward → learning
Certification
Section titled “Certification”Definition: A formal assertion that declared criteria were evaluated under a defined program by an authorized certifier.
Usage rule: ANUKA must not describe a self-declaration or automated check as independent certification.
Conformance
Section titled “Conformance”Definition: The state of satisfying requirements in a named specification version.
ANUKA-Aligned
Section titled “ANUKA-Aligned”Definition: A documented self-declaration that a product follows a named version of ANUKA principles and publishes material exceptions.
Does not automatically mean: Foundation certification or endorsement.
Privacy and data terms
Section titled “Privacy and data terms”Public Data
Section titled “Public Data”Definition: Data intentionally made accessible to the public by an authorized party under applicable terms.
Does not automatically mean: Free of copyright, privacy, contract, data-protection, or reuse restrictions.
Private Data
Section titled “Private Data”Definition: Data not intended for unrestricted public access.
Personal Data
Section titled “Personal Data”Definition: Information relating to an identified or identifiable person, interpreted according to applicable law.
Selective Disclosure
Section titled “Selective Disclosure”Definition: Revealing only the claims or evidence necessary for a specific interaction rather than exposing an entire record.
Data Room
Section titled “Data Room”Definition: A controlled collection of documents and evidence shared for diligence, financing, partnership, acquisition, or another declared review.
Source of Truth
Section titled “Source of Truth”Definition: The authoritative system or record designated for a specific data type or decision.
Does not automatically mean: Infallible source. A source of truth can still contain errors and requires governance.
Onchain
Section titled “Onchain”Definition: Recorded directly in a blockchain transaction or smart-contract state.
Offchain
Section titled “Offchain”Definition: Stored or transmitted outside blockchain state, potentially with cryptographic signatures, hashes, or references.
Economic terms
Section titled “Economic terms”Reward
Section titled “Reward”Definition: Compensation or recognition issued under declared rules after a contribution, review, milestone, or result.
Fixed Fee
Section titled “Fixed Fee”Definition: A predetermined amount paid for defined work or acceptance conditions.
Revenue Share
Section titled “Revenue Share”Definition: A contractual right to receive a defined portion of specified revenue under stated accounting and timing rules.
Does not automatically mean: Equity, profit share, partnership, security, or ownership.
Equity
Section titled “Equity”Definition: A legally recognized ownership interest in an entity or asset.
Usage rule: Equity exists only through appropriate legal instruments and records, not through product copy, points, badges, or attestations alone.
Definition: A digitally represented unit implemented on a programmable ledger or similar system.
Does not automatically mean: Currency, security, equity, governance right, utility, legal tender, or transferable property right. Classification depends on design, rights, marketing, and law.
Tokenless by Default
Section titled “Tokenless by Default”Definition: ANUKA’s rule that core identity, contribution, reputation, discussion, and conventional payment functions should work without requiring a speculative token.
Balance
Section titled “Balance”Definition: A product ledger showing funds, credits, usage, obligations, or available spending capacity.
Usage rule: The legal nature of each balance type must be explicit; not every displayed balance is customer-owned money or withdrawable value.
Governance terms
Section titled “Governance terms”Governance
Section titled “Governance”Definition: The processes by which authority, rules, priorities, disputes, and shared resources are decided and reviewed.
Proposal
Section titled “Proposal”Definition: A versioned request to change a rule, standard, budget, protocol, product mandate, or governance decision.
Decision Record
Section titled “Decision Record”Definition: A durable record of a decision, its owner, rationale, alternatives, evidence, trade-offs, and reconsideration conditions.
Definition: A document or rule open to substantive change and not yet ratified.
Review
Section titled “Review”Definition: A period or process in which affected participants evaluate and comment on a draft, contribution, claim, or decision.
Ratified
Section titled “Ratified”Definition: Approved through the governance process designated for that document or rule version.
Superseded
Section titled “Superseded”Definition: Replaced by a newer record while retained for history and interpretation of past decisions.
Dispute
Section titled “Dispute”Definition: A documented challenge to a claim, method, payment, review, policy application, or record.
Correction
Section titled “Correction”Definition: A record that fixes or contextualizes an error while preserving a legible relationship to the prior record when appropriate.
Definition: An independent continuation of open code, schemas, or governance documents under applicable licenses.
Does not automatically mean: Right to use ANUKA trademarks, private data, hosted services, or contractual relationships.
Documentation and implementation terms
Section titled “Documentation and implementation terms”API-First
Section titled “API-First”Definition: Core capabilities are designed as stable programmatic interfaces before being limited to one user interface.
Agent-Accessible
Section titled “Agent-Accessible”Definition: A capability can be safely discovered and used by authorized AI agents through documented tools, permissions, schemas, and error behavior.
Definition: A maintained software development kit that helps developers integrate a service or protocol.
Definition: A command-line interface for humans, scripts, and agents.
Definition: A documented capability package that teaches an AI agent when and how to use tools, APIs, workflows, or domain rules.
skill.md
Section titled “skill.md”Definition: A Markdown-based skill description used to make an agent capability legible, versionable, and repository-native. Exact schema and runtime support must be identified per implementation.
Reference Implementation
Section titled “Reference Implementation”Definition: An implementation intended to demonstrate a specification and accelerate adoption.
Does not automatically mean: The only conforming implementation or the required production provider.
Docs as Code
Section titled “Docs as Code”Definition: Managing documentation through version control, reviews, automated checks, releases, and deployment workflows similar to software.
Controlled-language rule
Section titled “Controlled-language rule”When a term could create a legal or trust implication, product interfaces should add the necessary qualifier.
Prefer:
- “verified against Stripe source data for the stated period” over “verified company”;
- “ANUKA-aligned self-declaration” over “ANUKA certified”;
- “product steward for a six-week mandate” over “owner”;
- “contextual reputation evidence” over “social score”;
- “sponsored feature request” over “investment” unless it is legally an investment;
- “simulation” over “forecast” when the output is exploratory;
- “attestation signed by X” over “blockchain-proven truth.”
Primary references
Section titled “Primary references”- W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0
- W3C Decentralized Identifiers v1.0
- Ethereum Attestation Service core concepts
- BCP 14 normative language
- IRS worker-classification guidance
- SEC CorpFin Crypto Assets
See the Source Registry for the complete validated list.
Verification record
- External links checked: 2 August 2026
- Document status: Draft 0.1
- Legal review: Required before terms are reused in contracts, payment flows, employment classification, investment products, or certification claims