Governance, conflicts, and change control
The Black Hole Index is a public-good instrument. Its credibility depends on rules that bind the principal investigator as tightly as any external user. This page records who can change what, on what notice, with what disclosure, and with what audit trail.
What this instrument is, and is not
The Black Hole Index™ (BHI) is a published index of structural lock-in risk for digital platforms. It is constructed from eleven observable, replicable parameters grouped into three pillars (Capture, Escape, Extended), aggregated into a scalar score.
- The instrument is not investment advice.
- The instrument is not a regulatory finding.
- The instrument is not a trade secret. Every weight and threshold is open under CC-BY 4.0.
External oversight
Corrected 19 September 2026. This section previously read: “A Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) reviews methodology changes before publication. The board meets twice per year.” No such board exists and none has met. Every seat below has stood open since this page was written, so no methodology change this project has published has been reviewed by an advisory board, and the sentence asserted external oversight that is not in place. The seats are a standing open call and are kept here as one; what follows describes an intention, not a body in being.
How a methodology change becomes effective
No weight, threshold, or indicator definition may be silently changed between published bulletins. Changes follow a five-stage protocol.
Corrected 19 September 2026: three of these five stages are not in force, and saying so is the correction. Stage 02 requires a board that does not exist (§ 02 lists six open seats, while the stage itself names five members), so it has never been executed. Stage 03 names the OSF registry, and /changelog records that the OSF filing has not been done. What this project does instead is freeze a protocol by digest in its append-only record at /research-snapshots.txt before the work it governs begins — a different mechanism, and not a filing on that registry. Stage 04 names a calendar boundary that the current release did not follow: Q4‑2026 was published on 15 September 2026. Stages 01 and 05 are in force. The protocol is left standing as written so that what was promised and what was done can be compared; it is not a description of the process now in use.
Milestones, and where the real record is
Corrected 8 September 2026. This line previously read “The audit log is append-only. The most recent entries are reproduced below.” The five entries below arehand-maintained milestones written into this page, not rows of a log: nothing appends to them, nothing prevents their being edited, and they stop at July 2026. The project does keep a genuine append-only record — every entry dated, never edited after publication, its full-file digest pinned in a checker that fails if a byte of the history changes — and it is published in full at /research-snapshots.txt. That is the audit log. What follows is a summary.
Disclosed positions, equity, and consulting
Every person with the ability to change a weight or indicator value must disclose equity holdings, employment, or paid consulting with any scored platform.
| Disclosing party | Relationship | Counterparty | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| I. Savich (PI) | No equity in any scored platform | — | Annual affirmation |
Where the operating budget comes from
The instrument is operated on the principal investigator’s own resources. Commercial licensing is offered (see /licensing); all data and methods remain free and open under CC BY 4.0. No funding is accepted from any platform the index scores or from any party with an interest in its results.
If a scored platform believes a value is wrong
Any party may file a Correction Request. Requests are reviewed and adjudicated within 21 calendar days.
Contact
What happens if the instrument is wrong
If the rolling four-quarter Spearman ρ falls below 0.50 for two consecutive bulletins, the instrument is placed in review status. If review persists for four quarters, the instrument is retired.
19 September 2026 — Governance amendment. The previously stated rolling four-quarter rank-correlation trigger is not currently computed and will not be reconstructed retrospectively. Until a prospective external-criterion protocol with a pre-declared decision rule exists, review status may change only through an explicit, dated governance decision stating the evidence and rationale. Such a decision is a governance classification, not evidence of external validation.
— End of charter v3.0. Steward: I. Savich. Effective 14 Feb 2026.