Why Independent Impact

Traditional impact reporting and verification systems are slow, expensive, and monopolised, placing heavy financial and technical barriers in front of smaller or locally rooted initiatives. Verifiers often lack local knowledge, and methodologies can be limited or misaligned with the real issues. The result is a system that rewards scale over integrity, privileges middle-men over households, and leaves impact claims difficult to compare, trust, or verify.

Independent Impact aims to turn this model on its head using two principles: everything should be transparent and everything can be evaluated.

Having transparency as the basis of the ecosystem makes auditing faster and thus cheaper. By emphasising radical transparency, we can simultaneously maintain flexibility and avoid monopolies based on the authority of so-called experts. When each action and artefact is transparent, users do not have to blindly believe so-called experts but can decide for themselves how to value the outcomes.

Independent Impact is based on the idea that agents, methods, and artefacts all accrue reputation through ongoing peer review. Participants earn reputation in their fields of expertise as they contribute. Evaluation is multi-dimensional: the traditional model relies on VVBs (Validation and Verification Bodies), while we emphasise validation and verification workflows where multiple agents assess different aspects. For example, a local resident can fact-check on-the-ground implementation claims while a technical expert evaluates the design. A project’s reputation reflects the evaluations it receives, taking into account the reputation of evaluators.

We believe in community. A reputation-based system, built on the expertise of practitioners who understand local contexts, can systematically and reliably validate and verify impact. We are building technology that simplifies the process, strengthens transparency, and builds lasting trust.

Independent Impact’s protocol is anchored in four reinforcing sets of principles that keep the ecosystem open while guarding rigour.

• General – openness invites participation, guidance replaces heavy prescription, and meritocracy ensures responsibility follows proven contribution.
• Impact – activities must be purposeful, do no harm, stay effective and efficient, include affected communities, and adapt as evidence emerges.
• Accounting – relevance, completeness, consistency, accuracy, conservativeness, transparency, traceability, and verifiability determine how impacts are quantified.
• Reporting – clarity, relevance, completeness, faithful representation, accessibility, accountability, and comparability define how evidence is communicated.

Platform tooling walks activity owners and reviewers through these checklists so adherence is rewarded and deviations are visible.

Every agent accrues reputation in two domains. Knowledge & Skills reputation tracks subject-matter expertise across specific subdomains, growing through verified credentials, high-quality contributions, and peer recognition, and shrinking through inaccurate work or time-based decay. Conduct reputation reflects how reliably, collaboratively, and respectfully an agent behaves, awarding points for constructive actions and deducting them for cancellations, misinformation, or community downvotes. Reputation unlocks work opportunities, income streams, and governance rights—while persistent misconduct can suspend privileges until balances recover.

The Independent Impact protocol blends semantic foundations with transparent infrastructure. Ontologies from the AIA suite give shared language for agents, activities, events, and states; Hedera underpins tamper-evident event logging; and Fluree’s time-travelable graph keeps every artefact, author, and revision traceable. Impact scoring evaluates validation and verification strength, while bounties, reviews, and voting use the reputation system to steer collaboration. The result is a non-prescriptive platform where anyone can document impact, yet the provenance and credibility of each claim remain auditable end to end.