Editorial & Open Web Charter

/ v1.0

Version 1.0 — 10 September 2026 — APPROVED

Purpose

INDEX:80 exists to make the Cardano ecosystem easier to find, understand and navigate.

It began from a simple problem: useful projects are scattered between search engines, X accounts, Discord servers, abandoned directories and old links. Current projects can be surprisingly difficult to discover, while dead or obsolete links often remain visible long after a project has moved or disappeared.

INDEX:80 therefore maintains a human-reviewed index of projects and their public presence on the web.

It is an index, not a ranking system, recommendation engine or investment guide.

Its job is to answer a simpler question: what is this project, where is its genuine public home, and what evidence supports our decision to include it?

Why INDEX:80

The name refers to TCP port 80, historically the default network port for ordinary HTTP web traffic. It is a deliberate reference to the simple, directly addressable World Wide Web: URLs, HTML and open links that can be read without a proprietary application or feed.

INDEX:80 takes that idea as a design principle rather than as nostalgia. The project should remain easy to address, easy to inspect and useful to people and machines alike.

1. The open-web principle

INDEX:80 is built in the spirit of the original World Wide Web and is informed by principles associated with the World Wide Web Foundation, the Contract for the Web and open web standards developed through bodies such as the W3C.

The early Web was built around universality, decentralisation, bottom-up development and interoperable standards rather than requiring permission from a central platform. INDEX:80 should preserve those qualities wherever practical. We aim to be open, inclusive and informative, and peer-to-peer in spirit: encouraging direct linking, direct discovery and participation without unnecessary gatekeepers.

A project record should therefore have a normal permanent URL, readable HTML, genuine hyperlinks and machine-readable structured data. Important information should not require an account, proprietary app, JavaScript framework or INDEX:80 API merely to be accessed.

Humans, browsers, search engines, researchers, scripts and AI systems should be able to read essentially the same public information. As more human and machine decisions depend on web data, the quality of that information matters more. INDEX:80 should therefore favour information that is verified, transparent, useful, evidence-based, editorially independent and available to all.

We prefer open standards over proprietary interfaces, links over feeds, and durable documents over ephemeral timelines.

2. The index is editorial

Nothing appears in the public INDEX:80 registry merely because an automated system found it.

Discovery can be automated. Research can be automated. Classification can be assisted by machines. Publication cannot.

Every public project record must have passed a human editorial decision.

A record being present in INDEX:80 therefore means that we have checked its identity, relevant public links and current public presence sufficiently to include it in the index. This is what "verified by INDEX:80" means.

It does not mean that INDEX:80 endorses the project, guarantees its security, audits its code, certifies its token, recommends an investment or guarantees that statements made by the project are true.

3. Human judgement remains final

INDEX:80 uses a structured governance approach for how AI tools contribute to research, development and publication.

Different AI systems have different strengths, so we deliberately use more than one. Current tools may include ChatGPT for research, evidence synthesis, data architecture and editorial reasoning; Gemini for independent research and comparison; Claude for repository implementation, structured review and technical work; and Muse or other specialist tools for additional analysis or alternative perspectives.

The specific tools may change. INDEX:80 is model-agnostic: no AI model or vendor has privileged editorial authority. We choose tools according to the task and cross-check important findings where appropriate.

Their findings can disagree. That is useful. No AI system has editorial authority simply because it produces a confident answer. Where evidence conflicts, the disagreement should be visible internally and investigated.

A human reviews every project before publication, including the primary link, and retains the final editorial decision.

We also apply the KISS principle to both software and AI workflows. We prefer the simplest system that solves the problem. Complexity must justify itself. Human-readable interfaces and human visual judgement remain the final test.

Automated systems should support an explainable and accountable process, not replace editorial responsibility.

4. Evidence before judgement

INDEX:80 should be able to explain why a record was published.

We will publish the evidence, reference classes and methods needed to understand our editorial decisions, and we will open-source publishable development wherever practical. Credentials, private submission data, security-sensitive configuration and material that must remain private for legal, privacy or security reasons are excluded.

Research begins with the project's own public presence where available: its canonical website, documentation, official social accounts and source-code repositories.

We supplement that with independent or historical evidence. This may include:

fresh HTTP checks of canonical links and redirects;
historical snapshots from the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine;
RDAP domain-registration information, used only as supporting evidence rather than proof of project age;
GitHub repository history where relevant;
Common Crawl or other public web datasets where useful;
Cardano-native identifiers and on-chain references where they materially help establish identity;
other reliable public datasets that materially improve the record.

No single dataset is assumed to be infallible.

A domain registration date does not prove that a project existed on that date. A historical archive proves that a page was observed, not necessarily that a project was continuously active. A working website does not prove that the underlying project remains healthy.

INDEX:80 records the evidence and its limitations rather than converting uncertainty into false precision.

5. History matters

INDEX:80 should preserve changes rather than constantly overwriting the past.

If a project's website changes, an old link dies, a new canonical domain appears, a project becomes inactive, or a previously active service disappears, that history has value.

Where evidence allows it, records should distinguish between:

earliest public web evidence;
first observed by INDEX:80;
last checked by INDEX:80;
current link status;
material changes to canonical destinations.

We should say, for example, "earliest archived evidence: 2021" rather than claiming "active since 2021" unless continuous activity can genuinely be demonstrated.

Over time, INDEX:80 should become not just a directory of today's Cardano web, but a useful record of how that web changed.

6. Provenance should be understandable

Important editorial claims should have understandable provenance.

Internally we may retain raw filenames, retrieval dates, automated confidence scores, HTTP information, model outputs and technical research logs.

Publicly, these should be translated into meaningful evidence labels such as: Official website · Official documentation · GitHub · Cardano on-chain record · Wayback archive · INDEX:80 link check.

A visitor should not need access to our internal workspace to understand the basis of a record. Where appropriate, evidence itself should remain directly linkable.

7. People before metrics

INDEX:80 may measure activity, age, transaction information, development, links and other signals, but those measurements should help people make their own judgements rather than create a simplistic score that pretends to determine whether a project is "good".

Useful evidence should inform. It should not manufacture authority.

The index should organise information, not replace judgement.

8. No pay-to-rank

Payment must never determine inclusion, verification status, search position, editorial judgement or Featured status.

If INDEX:80 later accepts sponsorship, advertising or commercial support, it must be clearly separated from editorial records.

A project should not be able to purchase the appearance of independent credibility.

9. Privacy and restraint

INDEX:80 should collect as little personal information as is reasonably necessary.

Our subject is primarily public projects and public web resources, not private individuals.

We should avoid unnecessary profiling, invasive tracking or accumulation of personal information simply because it is technically obtainable.

Analytics should remain proportionate, transparent and subject to applicable consent requirements.

10. Corrections are part of the system

An open index must be correctable.

Projects and users should have a straightforward way to point out an incorrect link, classification, description, identifier or status.

Corrections should be reviewed rather than silently accepted, and material changes should leave enough history to understand what changed.

Being wrong occasionally is inevitable. Being unable to explain or correct why we were wrong is not.

11. Open participation without open publication

Anyone should be able to suggest a project, submit a correction or identify a missing resource.

But openness to contributions does not mean automatic publication. Submissions enter the editorial process: CAPTURE → RESEARCH → REVIEW → HUMAN DECISION → PUBLISH.

The public index contains the result of that process, not the raw intake queue.

12. Durability over novelty

INDEX:80 should favour technologies likely to remain readable.

Plain HTML, standard URLs, JSON, Schema.org structured data, HTTP and ordinary hyperlinks are features, not limitations.

We should introduce new dependencies only when they solve a real user problem.

A page generated today should ideally remain intelligible years from now even if INDEX:80 itself no longer exists.

13. Independence from platforms and algorithmic feeds

X, Discord, Telegram, GitHub and other platforms are valuable sources of discovery and communication, especially in Web3. They are part of the ecosystem and INDEX:80 should link to genuine official accounts where they help users find and understand a project.

But these platforms are privately controlled. Their ranking systems, APIs, commercial priorities and access rules can change, and algorithmic feeds can determine what people see without providing a durable or neutral record of the underlying ecosystem.

INDEX:80 should therefore never treat a social timeline as the canonical database. Wherever possible, transient social signals should resolve back to durable open-web resources, and our own evidence of an editorial decision should be retained.

INDEX:80 is not anti-social-media. It deliberately provides an alternative to algorithm-dependent discovery: a stable index in which a useful project does not have to win an engagement contest simply to be found.

14. Human-scale communication

INDEX:80 should communicate at a human scale.

We prefer concise, respectful and useful communication. We listen before broadcasting, avoid engagement bait and unnecessary volume, and do not optimise our editorial voice merely to satisfy an algorithm.

INDEX:80 itself should not engage in partisan political or religious advocacy. This is a rule for our own editorial voice, not a prohibition on accurately indexing projects that genuinely involve governance, politics, religion or other contested subjects.

Our aim is to help people find information, understand the evidence and make their own judgements.

15. Publication test

Before publishing a project, the editor should be able to answer five questions:

Identity — are we confident this is the project it claims to be?
Destination — have we identified the best current canonical destination?
Currency — is there reasonable evidence that the project or resource currently exists in the state we describe?
Evidence — could we explain to someone else what sources led us to that conclusion?
Human review — has an editor actually looked at the record and its primary link?

If we cannot answer those questions adequately, the record stays in review and does not appear on the public index.

16. Relationship to the Data & Privacy Policy

This Charter governs INDEX:80's editorial, evidence and open-web principles. It should inform, but does not replace, the site's formal privacy and data-compliance documents.

Before public launch, INDEX:80 should maintain a clear Data & Privacy Policy covering, as applicable: what personal data is collected through submissions, analytics, contact forms and operational logs; the purpose and lawful basis for that processing; cookies and analytics consent; retention and deletion periods; third-party processors and hosting services; individual rights and contact routes; security and access controls; how public-source research and project-contact information are handled; and correction and removal requests.

The public Charter may sit alongside that policy, or its relevant principles may be incorporated into a combined "Method, Data & Privacy" area. Editorial methodology and privacy obligations should remain clearly distinguishable so users can understand both.

17. Our promise

INDEX:80 will try to be small enough to understand, open enough to inspect, simple enough to survive, and useful enough to deserve a place on the web.

We will use automation extensively, but we will not hide behind it.

We will distinguish evidence from opinion, publication from endorsement, historical observation from certainty, and machine assistance from human judgement.

And we will keep returning to one principle: the index exists to help people find the Cardano web. The Cardano web does not exist to feed the index.

Reference principles

This Charter is informed by open-web principles associated with the World Wide Web Foundation and the Contract for the Web, including universality, decentralisation, open standards, privacy, public participation, accountability and the idea of the web as a resource for people. It also reflects the role of open standards developed through organisations such as the W3C.

Status

Approved v1.0 — 10 September 2026. This version consolidates the v0.1 Charter, the human review notes and the subsequent editorial discussion. It is the approved governing Charter for INDEX:80.