55. Skip to content

55. Qualification, adoption, and binding

Technical approval of a source and the decision to use it are different decisions, made by different organisations. Keeping them separate prevents one organisation's authorisation from silently travelling to another country or consumer.

55.1 The three steps

  1. Qualification is issued by the source authority and states that one exact source version meets a stated technical and governance scope.
  2. Adoption is issued by the consuming organisation and states that it considers a qualified source suitable for named uses.
  3. Binding seals the exact source version to an advisory cycle, so historical advice does not change when a source is later updated.
flowchart LR
    Q[Qualification<br/>source authority] --> A[Adoption<br/>consuming organisation]
    A --> B[Binding<br/>sealed to an advisory cycle]

55.2 Portable and organisation-scoped

Authorisation is organisation-scoped, never automatically country-scoped or transferable. For an offline installation, a qualification can travel as a signed, portable bundle carrying source fingerprints, supporting evidence, gate decisions, scope, expiry, and a signature — so an agency running a sovereign deployment can verify governance decisions without any network call.

Because a binding records the exact source version used, an advisory remains reproducible: you can always determine which source produced a given cycle's advice. This complements the decision trace, which records the reasoning over that source.