The Decision Assurance Council.
An independent, vendor-neutral body stewarding Decision Assurance as an open discipline — its standard, its lexicon, and its body of knowledge.
A discipline owned by no single vendor.
The Council exists to establish Decision Assurance as an open, vendor-neutral discipline — so that any organization can make consequential decisions that are complete, consistent, governed, grounded, and on the record — and provable — without surrendering human judgment. Its legitimacy depends on being credibly independent of any single vendor — including Arclave. The Council keeps its own home and identity at decisionassurance.org; Arclave is a founding contributor and one implementer, not its owner.
What the Council stewards.
The standard
The Decision Assurance Levels (DAL) — the open specification that grades decisions by consequence and prescribes the required assurance and autonomy at each level. Versioned and maintained openly.
The lexicon
The canonical definitions of the discipline — Decision Assurance, Decision Control, the decision system of record, and related terms — so the field shares one language.
The body of knowledge
Reference practices, maturity guidance, case patterns, and — over time — anonymized, aggregated evidence on what works.
Five commitments, stated up front.
Open
The standard and lexicon are public and freely usable.
Vendor-neutral
No single vendor controls the standard; implementers compete on products, not on owning the definition.
Evidence-based
Guidance is grounded in research and outcomes, not assertion — consistent with the discipline's own honesty about what AI can and cannot do.
Practitioner-led
The people who run real decision-making bodies shape the standard — not analysts or vendors talking at them.
Cross-industry
Architecture, risk, audit, finance, healthcare, and government perspectives — to avoid any single field's blind spots.
The Council only confers legitimacy if it is not a marketing arm.
So the independence is built in, not promised: a separate identity and home; Arclave as one member among many, with no control over ratification; capped vendor influence on the steering committee; an open invitation to competitors; and disclosed, diversifying, non-vendor-dominated funding — with a pre-committed transition toward an elected or independent chair as the Council matures.
Founding endorsers.
The founding cohort is forming now. We are recruiting a small group of cross-industry practitioners — in architecture, risk, audit, finance, healthcare, and government — to shape the discipline from the start.
No endorsements are shown yet — by design. Arclave is in private charter preview, and the Decision Assurance category is in formation. We publish names and words only when they are real and approved. If you lead a decision-making body and the principles above describe how you already think, we would like you among the founding endorsers.
Help steward the discipline.
The Council partners with — rather than replaces — established professional bodies. If you want to help shape Decision Assurance as an open standard, start a conversation.