Values Passport (Open Values Standard v0.1)

A Values Commons primitive defined by the Open Values Standard. The portable, user-owned record of what a person values — readable by any instance, owned by no platform. This is what lets "your values travel" across the federation (Conscious Consuming → Kosplora → …). 2026-06-22; naming canon updated 2026-07-02.

Values Commons is the public ecosystem. The Open Values Standard is the protocol. A Values Passport is the small file a person owns inside that ecosystem.

The format

A small JSON file the user holds locally and carries between instances:

{
  "format": "open-values-passport",
  "version": "0.1",
  "source": "conscious-consuming",
  "exported": "2026-06-22T00:00:00Z",
  "values": { "openness": 5, "access": 4, "planet": 5, "people": 4 }
}

• values maps a shared universal value → a 0–5 weight (0 ignore … 5 most). Nothing else is required — no identity, no email, no account, no tracking. It is just what you care about, in a form anything can read.

The shared universal vocabulary

The bridge that makes values portable across domains. Each instance maps its own criteria/themes onto these:

• planet — environment, sustainability, durability
• people — fairness, ethics, others' wellbeing
• openness — transparency, open & free, independence, anti-lock-in
• access — affordable, accessible, low-barrier, easy
• wellbeing — health, safety, calm
• autonomy — privacy, control, ownership
• animals — non-human welfare
• community — local, independent, co-operative
• quality — rigour, craft, depth, accuracy
• joy — engagement, delight, beauty

(v0.1 — the set grows only as new instances genuinely need it; that growth is the standard's open governance, the way the Kosplora test once forced v0→v0.1.)

How instances map in

• Conscious Consuming (instance #1): planet→planet · people→people · health→wellbeing · honesty→openness · privacy→autonomy · animals→animals · cost→access · local→community.
• Kosplora (instance #2, learning) receives via its universalToLocal bridge: openness→open · **people & community→*open*** (caring for fairness and the commons → favouring equitable, open, free learning) · access & wellbeing→ease · quality→rigour · joy→ease. Planet, animals and autonomy have no honest expression in "where to learn", so they stay home — and the engine reports that plainly (below).

What carries — and what honestly doesn't (engine v0.9)

A value that doesn't fit a domain must never be silently dropped (that would quietly misrepresent your stance) nor faked into some unrelated criterion. So passportApply returns, alongside the derived weights:

• carried — values you prioritised (≥4) that found a home in this space, each { universal, local, weight }.
• dropped — values you prioritised that this space has no honest way to express (e.g. planet when choosing where to learn).

The receiving instance shows both, plainly — "Honesty, Fairness now weigh on your rankings; Planet doesn't map to this space." Neutral values (weight 3) are never reported — only the priorities you actually set. This is enforced in the engine and proven by research/values_spine_test.js: a Conscious Consuming honesty/fairness passport re-ranks Kosplora toward open resources, while planet is reported as not-transferred rather than dropped or faked.

The point

The values that span domains (openness, access) carry over honestly; the domain-specific ones (planet, rigour) simply stay home — and the receiving instance says so plainly. As more instances join, more values bridge. No central server ever holds the passport — it lives with the person, exported and imported as a file they own. That portability of the self, across an ownerless federation, is the whole point of Values Commons and the standard underneath it.