🟢 Commons — Public
The CIAO Standard is governed not only by the Standard itself, but by a set of internal policies and processes that operate the Standard — how change is managed, how editorial submissions are routed, how versions are released, how errata are handled, how the document control state machine works.
This page is the canonical index of those administrative instruments. Each instrument is a separate controlled document under its own reference, with its own document control header, version history, and review cycle. Together they form the operational machinery of the CIAO Standard — distinct from the Standard’s normative content (CAO domains, frameworks, manuals, policies) and distinct from the Standard’s foundational governance (Constitution, Charter, Code of Practice).
Foundational Governance
Class A · Constitutional
The foundational document of the CIAO Standard — the rules about how the rules can change, the four governing bodies and their authorities, the foundational commitments to members, and the amendment procedure that protects the Constitution from unilateral revision.
C-AO/CON/001:2026
Class B · Foundational
The day-to-day operating rules — how the Panel, Secretariat, Members, and bodies interact. Operates under the Constitution and codifies the procedural detail the Constitution leaves to operating instruments.
See Charter document control
Class B · Foundational
The behavioural standards binding members, partners, advisors, and Secretariat staff in their participation in the CIAO community. Operates under the Constitution and the Charter.
See Code document control
Active Administrative Instruments
Process
How proposed changes are categorised, reviewed, scheduled, and released. The release cadence and the backward-compatibility commitments members can rely on between releases.
C-AO/PRC/CMV/001:2026
Process
How practitioner contributions, observations, and proposals enter the CIAO Standard. The three submission channels, the tier-bounded submission scope, and the attribution mechanics that bring contributors into the change pipeline.
C-AO/PRC/ESF/001:2026
Calendar
Public schedule of CIAO Standard releases. Major release horizon, next minor release window, change pipeline by category, and the append-only release event log.
C-AO/CAL/REL/001:2026
Summary
Quarterly public record of confirmed errata patches and contribution-submission activity. The operational expression of the transparency commitment in Constitution Section 3.
C-AO/SUM/QES/001:2026
Register
The catalogue of source standards CIAO maintains current mappings for. Twenty-six entries across seven families. Operated against by the Dynamic Selection Engine for member-portfolio filtering of inline references.
C-AO/REG/SSR/001:2026
Process
Quality discipline for controlled documents. Six pre-publication gates (metadata, version history, supersedes-chain, MVE freshness, chip-discipline, cross-reference integrity) plus post-publication rendering of header and three footer sections (Version History, Linked Documents, References) on every controlled document.
C-AO/PRC/DQC/001:2026
Relationship to Other Documents
The administrative instruments listed on this page are not the Standard’s foundational governance — those live separately in the Constitution, the Governance Charter, and the Code of Practice. The administrative instruments operate under the authority granted by those foundational documents. Where an administrative instrument’s authority comes from a particular section of a foundational document, the instrument’s text states that linkage explicitly.
The administrative instruments are also distinct from the Standard’s normative content — see the Standard Architecture for the structure of normative documents (CAO domain spine, tier ladder, Aggregate Frameworks).
Part of the CIAO Standard architecture — see Standard Architecture & Tier Content Depth for the canonical domain spine and tier-by-tier content ladder.
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