Roles and relationships
MERENIC is a research initiative initiated by Majji Pradeep Kumar and developed with support from CyberMindSpace Private Limited. At Research Draft 0.1 there is no independent standards body, charter or appointed committee. The table separates the roles that exist now from those that are proposed.
| Role | Who | Responsibility | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| MERENIC methodology and research | The published thesis, protocol and study plan | Defines claims, evidence requirements and evaluation methods; revised through public review and field evidence. | Not a recognised standard or a validated assessment instrument. |
| Initiator | Majji Pradeep Kumar | Maintains the research draft, coordinates review and prepares Edition 01. | Proposes changes through the decision process below, with rationale published. |
| Supporting organisation | CyberMindSpace Private Limited | Supports development and the reference implementation. | Does not decide research conclusions on its own. MERENIC is not currently institutionally independent of CyberMindSpace. |
| Research Advisory Committee | Not yet formed | Would review methodology, drafts and field results, and publish its dispositions. | Members are listed only after they explicitly agree to participate. |
| Edition organisers | Named for each edition | Run an edition under a pinned specification, scenario and evaluator version. | Cannot change scoring rules during an edition. |
| Sponsors and partners | None announced | May provide funding, infrastructure or venues. | No authority over research findings, participant outcomes or assessment results. |
Financial or infrastructure support does not confer authority over assessment outcomes, research conclusions or protocol revisions.
No chair or steward role is assigned: such roles require an adopted charter and appointment process. The governance below is proposed, not a claim that an independent standards body or committee already exists. Institutional credibility must come from published decisions and review, not titles.
Research Advisory Committee
The proposed Research Advisory Committee would combine senior engineering and technology leadership with assessment research, domain operations and independent implementer perspectives. Seats remain unconfirmed. C-suite seniority alone is not a substitute for methodological expertise.
No members have been appointed. Members will be listed on the About page only after they explicitly agree to participate; affiliations will be shown for identification and will not imply institutional endorsement.
Members would review the thesis, construct map, architecture, failure taxonomy, successive drafts and field results. Each review produces a public disposition: accept, revise or reject, with rationale and conflicts disclosed. Members should challenge commercial assumptions as well as technical ones, including those of CyberMindSpace.
Proposed terms: one-year renewable appointments, a public interests register, recusal from conflicts, and an independent methodology lead. The first charter should set quorum at two-thirds of filled seats and require a two-thirds majority of non-conflicted voting members for a release, with minority opinions recorded. These rules take effect only after charter ratification.
Decision process
An editor maintains the draft; a methodology group reviews assessment claims; implementers report interoperability defects; the committee reviews disputed changes and release readiness. CyberMindSpace supports development and the reference implementation but should not be the sole judge of its own conformance.
Each proposal carries a problem statement, affected requirements, evidence, compatibility impact and review window. Proposed public comment window: 30 days for substantive drafts. Urgent integrity fixes may be released sooner with written rationale and retrospective review. An appeal panel must exclude original scorers and conflicts.
This takes inspiration from open review and implementation-led standards development. It does not copy the IETF’s status labels or imply IETF sponsorship. [26]
Version lifecycle
| Stage | Status | Exit evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1 · Research Draft | Current · 28 Sep 2026 | Prior-art map, proposed contract, limitations and candidate experiment plan. |
| 0.2 · Review Draft | Planned | Charter adopted; advisors confirmed; comment dispositions and refined rubric. |
| 0.5 · Implementer Draft | Planned | Two independently operated adapters exchange evidence; reset and replay checks pass. |
| Edition 01 · Pilot | In development | Frozen protocol and registered analysis plan; study and operations approvals completed where applicable. |
| 0.x · Evidence Revision | Planned | Publish null results, disagreements, failure modes, costs and changes. |
| 1.0 · Stable Specification | Not scheduled | Independent implementations, acceptable validation evidence and governance release decision. |
Edition numbers identify field implementations; specification versions identify compatible requirements. An edition pins a specification, scenario and evaluator version. Never change scoring rules mid-edition without marking the affected runs incomparable and offering reruns. Breaking changes increment the major version after 1.0; historical results retain their original evaluator.
Edition 01 as an experiment
FIRST CONTROLLED PILOT · IN DEVELOPMENT
Edition 01 will be the first implementation of MERENIC. It will test the framework as well as its participants: alongside participants’ engineering judgement, it is designed to generate evidence about the protocol itself. The following is a proposed study plan; it is not a claim of preregistration or a completed pilot. No date, venue, organisers or sponsors have been announced, and the event will be documented separately from this research site.
| Hypothesis | Primary observable | Falsification / revision trigger |
|---|---|---|
| H1: receipts improve judgement consistency. | Two blinded raters score full bundles and independently assigned artifact-only packets. | No improvement in agreement, or differences explained by extra reading time alone. |
| H2: paired evidence predicts held-out consequences better than presentation ratings. | Compare association with a separate common holdout result. | No improvement, wide inconclusive intervals or weight-sensitive conclusions. |
| H3: justified restraint can be assessed without rewarding inactivity. | Blinded review of selected no-change and intervention claims; matched scenario opportunity. | Raters reward non-action independent of evidence or cannot distinguish defensible cases. |
| H4: the protocol is portable. | Independent operators replay the same bundles against pinned manifests. | Outcome differences exceed declared tolerance or missing artifacts prevent replay. |
| H5: evidence overhead is operationally tolerable. | Time spent documenting, cost per valid run, completion and accessibility feedback. | Overhead exceeds the host’s preregistered limit or excludes participant groups. |
Proposed pilot design
Recruit a feasibility cohort; a provisional planning range is 12–20 teams, not a powered confirmatory sample. Stratify by relevant experience and provide the same orientation and resource limits. Randomise review packets across raters and counterbalance scenario order. Keep final holdout outcomes unavailable to reviewers. Analyse team-level units; do not pretend hundreds of telemetry points are hundreds of participants.
Before recruitment, freeze hypotheses, exclusion rules, primary endpoints, confidence intervals, rater agreement method, missing-data handling, budget ceiling and go/no-go thresholds. An assessment researcher should estimate a confirmatory sample using pilot variance. Report uncertainty and effect sizes; do not infer validity from a small pilot’s p-value.
Capture consented decision receipts, interventions, event schedules, tool/resource declarations, rubric judgements, errors and operational effort. Avoid blanket capture of private prompts or secrets. Publish de-identified artifacts only with explicit rights and retention terms. An independent reviewer examines adverse findings before the next release.
Open adoption. Earned defensibility.
The recommended separation is an openly adoptable protocol and public conformance tests, alongside CyberMindSpace-operated scenario infrastructure, orchestration, support and validated environment libraries. Licensing is a governance decision still to be adopted; this draft does not silently assign ownership or claim an open-source licence on behalf of the organisation.
Potential defensibility comes from reliable adapters, scenario quality, independent field evidence, institutional trust and consented datasets—not the abstraction of observing and iterating. Hidden test sets need rotation and access controls, while score definitions and appeal rules stay public. Data advantage must be earned through permission, quality and representativeness.
Certification, if pursued, needs a separate impartiality and competency model. A host’s declaration is not third-party certification, and certification is not accreditation. [27]
The technical implementation of deterministic branching, signed provenance or isolation might merit professional prior-art review once concrete code exists. This review establishes no patentability. Patent eligibility is jurisdiction-specific; US guidance treats abstract-idea questions separately from merely implementing a process in software. [32]
Changelog
1 October 2026 · Site update. Clarified the initiator and the supporting role of CyberMindSpace Private Limited; replaced “founding steward” wording with a roles table; added How It Works and About pages. Protocol requirements are unchanged, and Research Draft 0.1 remains dated September 2026.
30 September 2026 · Draft refinement. Added the proposed Hackathon Lite profile, tool and commit provenance fields, and an illustrated city/infrastructure introduction. Removed unconfirmed advisor placeholders. No field-validation claim is added.
0.1 · 28 September 2026. Initial research draft. Narrowed the AI productivity claim; acknowledged cyber-range, competition and assessment precedents; adopted a POMDP-based model; separated diagnostic stress from comparable holdout evaluation; removed human-only attribution claims; added evidence gates, no-change submissions and the Edition 01 validation plan.
No prior released versions, advisor approvals, completed field studies or certified implementations are claimed.