Adoption
The badges¶
A project that adopts Split-Domain Cognition is committing to the refusal of the collapse — not in its prose about itself, but in its artefacts. The badge is the visible mark of that commitment. Hot-linked from the canon, in two themes, with four forms of follow.
Adoption is self-declared, in the Creative Commons sense. Anyone can pick a form of follow, embed the badge, and list themselves. The canon does not approve declarations at intake; there is no review queue. The four tests on the derivation protocol page are honesty conditions the declarer holds themselves to. Honesty is enforced primarily by the community of practitioners reading each other's claims; the arbiter retains the right to revoke declarations that turn out to be structurally dishonest. See governance for why this works and what the arbiter does and does not do.
Alignment — example
animal-rights v1.0¶
For projects whose artefact performs the separation a variant describes.
Derivation — example
editorial-work v1.0¶
For practitioners authoring a new variant for a domain not yet in the canon.
The four forms of follow¶
The word follow is underdetermined. A project — or a person — may follow SDC in four distinct ways, each with different honesty conditions and different weight. The first is the lightest; the last is the most substantial.
01 · Lightest
Support¶
Endorses the principle. Makes no artefact-level claim. Ten thousand support badges do not amount to one alignment. Variant-free.
02
Reference¶
Cites SDC as an influence on framing or thinking. Asserts SDC entered the project's thinking; does not claim structural evidence in artefacts.
03
Alignment¶
The project's own practice performs the separation. Structural evidence in the artefact is required and pointable-to. Not language about separation — the separation itself.
04 · Most substantial
Derivation¶
Authors a new variant for a new domain using the derivation protocol. This adds to the canon rather than adopting from it. Reviewed against the four tests.
The fuller anatomy of each form — what it claims, what it must show, who it is appropriate for, what its honesty conditions are — appears below.
Support — what it claims and what it must show¶
The supporter agrees with SDC as a principle and wishes to make that agreement visible. The supporter does not claim that SDC has shaped any work of theirs, nor that any artefact of theirs performs the separation. Support is intellectual endorsement — a public marker that says this idea matters to me, without any further structural claim.
Nothing structural needs to be shown. The supporter is expected to have read at least the Preamble and SDC in brief and to find them coherent. Beyond that, the badge is the claim. Appropriate for individuals, institutions, and projects that find SDC convincing as a frame but have not yet woven it into a practice. A way of joining the conversation without overclaiming.
Support is the lightest form. The badge is honest only as long as the supporter does not let it stand in for work the supporter has not done.
Reference — what it claims and what it must show¶
The project cites SDC as an influence on its framing or its thinking. The project does not claim its own artefact performs the separation. Acknowledgement of the source, honest about the scope of influence. Reference asks for more than support — it asserts that SDC has actually entered the project's thinking — but does not require structural evidence in artefacts. Appropriate for writing, teaching, grant narratives, talks, position papers that cite SDC as one of several frames they draw on.
Alignment — what it claims and what it must show¶
The project's own practice performs the separation that the variant describes. Language work and judgement work are being held structurally apart in the project's actual artefact. Structural evidence in the artefact is required. Not language about separation — the separation itself, pointable to. A specific descriptive artefact. A specific rule or criterion prior to the case. A specific narration of the verdict that did not generate the verdict. If the project cannot point at these in the artefact, the alignment claim is not yet earned. Appropriate for tools, platforms, editorial pipelines, curatorial methods, ethics protocols, studio practices that have been built to the shape of a specific variant.
Derivation — what it claims and what it must show¶
The project authors a new variant, for a new domain, using the derivation protocol. This adds to the canon rather than adopting from it. Two things happen in parallel here, and they should not be confused. Declaring derivation — embedding the derivation badge on your project — is self-served like every other form of follow. Admitting the new variant to the canonical catalogue at /variants/{slug}/v1/ is editorial work and is reviewed against the four tests; this is the only path through which the canon itself grows. Derivation is the most substantial form because it carries both: a self-declaration that you are deriving, plus a submitted variant draft that the arbiter reads against the protocol. Appropriate for practitioners in a domain not yet represented in the variants catalogue, who have both stake in the domain and material to work from.
Declaration template¶
The declaration is a short, public statement that makes the form of follow visible. It begins with a level-2 heading reading exactly This project follows Split-Domain Cognition and is followed by the structured fields below:
**Form of follow:** {support | reference | alignment | derivation}
**Variant:** {slug} v{version} <!-- omit for support; support is not variant-specific -->
**Reviewed against:** derivation-protocol v{version}
**Structural evidence** (alignment only): {link or short description}
**Variant being authored** (derivation only): {slug or domain description}
**Project:** {project name and URL — or person and contact, for support}
**Declared:** {ISO date}
{One-sentence note on why the supporter / project adopts SDC.}
For an alignment declaration, the structural evidence field is load-bearing. A project that cannot fill it should reconsider whether alignment is the right form of follow, or whether reference would be more honest for now.
The Declare an adoption page generates this block live, alongside the badge embed code, after you pick a form and a variant.
How the badges work¶
Badges hot-link from the canon — the canon controls the file, the adopter only chooses which badge to embed. The image can be revised centrally without breaking adopter pages. A viewer who hovers the badge sees a URL on the canon's domain — not on the adopter's — which is the right asymmetry for a claim that points outward. As with Creative Commons, the act of embedding is opting out of a tacit default; the canon hosts the file because the claim points to the canon.
Every badge ships in two variants — light and dark — at the same URL with -dark appended before the extension. The embedder picks based on its own page theme rather than the viewer's OS preference, because the badge is meant to read clearly against the page it sits on. The two variants are pixel-equivalent in geometry; only the palette differs.
Embed pattern¶
<!-- canonical, light -->
[](https://splitdomaincognition.org)
<!-- canonical, dark -->
[](https://splitdomaincognition.org)
<!-- support, light -->
[](https://splitdomaincognition.org/adoption/#support)
<!-- per-(variant, form) — pattern -->
[](https://splitdomaincognition.org/variants/{slug}/v1/)
Text-only fallback¶
For environments that do not render images (RSS, plain-text README sections, terminal output):
This project follows [SDC](https://splitdomaincognition.org) — [{variant name} v{version}](https://splitdomaincognition.org/variants/{slug}/v1/) — as **{form}**.
Declared adoptions¶
Why a general acknowledgement, not a per-variant claim. SDC was named inside Koher and articulated across its practice; the canon was then lifted out of Koher into its own top-level project (see Origin). Koher is now one of several adopters of the principle it first named. The site-wide footer badge points back at the canon, not at any single Koher tool. Per-(variant, form) claims are reserved for individual tools whose artefacts perform the separation in code that the variant describes.
Conflict of interest, declared. Koher and the SDC arbiter share authorship. This is disclosed alongside every Koher-originated adoption claim. See governance — conflicts of interest.
Forthcoming — per-tool adoptions inside Koher¶
The first per-(variant, form) declaration scheduled to land inside Koher's tool surface is animalRightsLens under animal-rights-and-veganism v1.0 as alignment. The tool's three-stage pipeline — language stage that reads unstructured concept text and extracts signals; deterministic judgement stage that applies a rights-grounded rubric to those signals; narration stage that renders the verdict — is the structural evidence the alignment form requires. The tool is not yet public. The declaration will be lodged when the tool ships, with the four-test review record published alongside under the same conflict-of-interest disclosure.
What adoption does not confer¶
Adoption is not certification. The canon does not certify projects; it records whether declarations are structurally honest. Adoption is not endorsement. A declaration's acceptance is not a statement about the project's worth, only about the declaration's honesty. Adoption is not licensing. SDC is not a legal instrument. Adoption is not exclusive. A project may adopt multiple variants, and may combine SDC with other frames, provided the adoption claim remains honest about what SDC specifically contributes.