Canonical version v1.1.1 · 2026-07-19 · immutable snapshot · changelog
The whitepaper is the operational contract of GII-US: the data model, scoring formulas, evidence rules, review gates, and publication controls that any released value must satisfy. It pairs with the research paper, which grounds the same framework in the evaluation, causal-inference, and composite-indicator literature.
Contents
| # | Section | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product definition | Mission, intended users, what GII measures and does not measure, design principles. |
| 2 | Scope and classification | Federal jurisdictional boundary, nine decision origins (Congress through the Federal Reserve), scoreable event types, materiality screen, six impact domains, distributional overlays. |
| 3 | The Decision Impact Record | Stable GII identifiers, the minimum data contract, six clocks, status and maturity states. |
| 4 | Policy lineage and attribution | Typed relationship graph; legal provenance versus causal contribution; judicial controls; transfer reconciliation. |
| 5 | GII scorecard | GII-M, GII-D over the oriented set O, GII-C, GII-K as total variation on fractional shares, GII-V coverage with the withhold rule, GII-S maturity. |
| 6 | Causal evidence standard | Required causal statement, the normative A–F evidence ladder, method assignment, forecast scoring, rights and qualitative effects, attribution language. |
| 7 | Source architecture | Source hierarchy, authoritative decision and outcome systems, retrieval preference, data quality, PROV-O/DCAT provenance, and the PEPI external source adapter. |
| 8 | Production pipeline | Ten stage gates, automation limits, registry architecture, preregistration mechanism, reproducible release packages. |
| 9 | Review, governance, and publication | Six review roles, eligibility, corrections, semantic versioning, independence and first-party source disclosure, appeals, privacy and ethics. |
| 10 | Public products and API standard | Decision dossiers, institutional views, minimum API resources, explainability, GII-US naming. |
| 11 | Pilot and development roadmap | 24–36-lineage historical pilot, work packages, success criteria including named inter-rater statistics, phased roadmap. |
| 12 | Worked example | A fictional event carried end to end: theory of change, preregistered outcome map, publication decision, and the calculation worksheet behind every dimension. |
| 13 | Interpretation guidance | Reading an event scorecard, comparing institutions, comparing versions, and the common interpretation errors — starting with reading GII-M as approval. |
Versioning and immutability#
GII uses semantic versioning: major versions break comparability, minor versions add backward-compatible modules, patch versions clarify and correct without changing any construct, weight, threshold, taxonomy, or lifecycle definition. Prior versions remain published, retrievable, and visibly superseded — corrections create new vintages, never silent rewrites. A machine-readable statement of the current version is served at /methodology/version.json.