HUMANLEDGER

About

A working spec, not a manifesto

This site exists to hold one argument still long enough for people to attack it properly.

Why this exists

Serious institutions are already building pieces of a human ledger. The UN has a Beyond-GDP dashboard, the OECD has How’s Life?, the ONS tracks sixty well-being measures and Partnership on AI has a workforce well-being framework. The trouble is that the work sits in silos that don’t talk to each other, and none of it lands on the desk of anyone actually running an organisation.

Beyond-GDP thinking lives at the level of national accounts and never comes down to the level of a single organisation. Enterprise AI measurement does reach organisations, but it measures the exact opposite. Nobody has built the instrument in between, something a hospital trust, a law firm, a bank or an agency could actually disclose against, and that is the gap the Human Ledger is aimed at.

Who’s behind it

The Human Ledger is written by Rafael Freitas, who has spent twenty years in advertising and marketing, working in agencies and in brands and, more recently, building AI products for creative teams. The argument comes from watching the same pressure land on the same people from the inside: eternal growth targets, shrinking headcount, and AI deployed for volume rather than judgement.

That is why the one worked annex is creative, marketing and media: it is the sector he can write about with authority. The standard itself is for any organisation deploying AI over human work, and the other annexes need people from inside those sectors.

That vantage point is also the bias. This is written by somebody with a commercial interest in creative work continuing to be done by people, and you should know that when you weigh the argument.

More about the work behind it : twenty years of campaigns, businesses and AI products, in rather more detail than belongs on this page.

How to contribute

The useful contributions, in order:

  1. Kill a principle. Of the five proposed, Principle One is the one the rest depend on and the one I’d defend hardest, while the other four are design choices I’d happily lose an argument about.
  2. Write an annex. Five sectors are open: health, legal, finance, software and education. If you work in one, the core needs you to show what it looks like there.
  3. Answer one of the four open questions. Especially the fourth: what stays permanently out of scope, and who guards the boundary.
  4. Send a signal. If you spot a regulation move, new research or an industry data point that belongs in the field notes, send it over.

One deliberate absence

There are no comments here. Self-hosted discussion at this traffic level is a graveyard, and a half-empty comment box makes an argument look weaker than it is. The debate happens on LinkedIn, where the people who’d have to file these numbers actually are.

Licence

The five principles, the core disclosure set and the sector annexes are released under CC BY 4.0. Take them, use them, change them and argue with them in print. Adoption matters more than ownership, and a standard nobody can copy isn’t much of a standard.

Contact

Use this for anything that isn’t a public argument, such as a correction, a signal worth logging, a speaking request, or a metric you think can be rescued.