Not a certification. There is no badge.
Nothing here confers status on a design system, and nothing is withheld behind membership or a fee. There is no organisation, no committee and no vendor.
A score is a measurement with the working attached, so anyone can disagree with any part of it and check it themselves. Where something cannot be measured in a given repository it is recorded as not measured, with the reason, and that is never rendered as a failure.
Three things, each of which can be read.
Versioned, dated, and never changed silently.
The canonical text is version 1.0, September 2026. The definition and the six properties are versioned: a change to their wording carries a new version number and an entry in the changelog. Each property has a stable anchor so it can be cited on its own.
It is the discipline the protocol already has, applied to the prose.
Chris Learey.
One person, working alone. The standard came out of building the system in the Nivoda case, and the index exists so the claim is tested against systems built by other people.
Cite it, build to it, argue with it.
The definition, the six properties and the diagrams are published under CC BY 4.0. Use them with attribution.
A system can be submitted to the index and scored by the same protocol. Public systems only.
Assessments, occasionally.
Assessments are run for organisations that want one against their own repository, with the evidence attached and the limits stated. Some systems come out of it needing a rebuild. Plenty do not.