Status: Specification · Open · v0.3. A proposed shared method under active development by the Civic Commons — not yet a finished standard.
The Impact Measurement Protocol is a specification for capturing, scoring, and verifying outcomes across social, environmental, and economic dimensions — and the human dimension that underlies them — so that impact claims can be compared and trusted across contexts. It defines a common procedure, not a fixed set of metrics; the metrics themselves are expected to differ by domain.
Scope
The protocol covers any action, product, or service whose effect on well-being is being measured. It records impact in both directions: value created, and true cost — 0TRUECOST — which carries the harms and externalities conventional accounting omits. Net impact is defined as value created minus true cost, with all costs kept visible rather than externalized.
Procedure
- Capture. Record the outcome — the measurable change in well-being, and who it affects — rather than the activity performed. Each record is attributed at the point of capture.
- Score. Place the outcome on a bounded scale; the corpus proposes a seven-point scale from strong negative, through a neutral midpoint, to strong positive. Early scores are recorded as guestimates: estimates carrying an explicit confidence level and the reasoning behind them.
- Verify. Advance the claim through evidence stages — proposed, tested, proven, established — each requiring stronger corroboration than the last. Major claims must clear a consensus gate: stakeholder review, cross-context validation, alignment with the Prime Directive, and no unresolved blocking objection.
Provenance requirement
Every record carries two linked chains: the Chain of Accountability (COA — who performed the work and who is accountable) and the Chain of Impact (COI — what resulted). A measurement without both is not conformant. Provenance is what allows a figure to be audited rather than merely believed.
Status and open problems
At v0.3 the protocol is a working shape, not a settled standard. Its principal unresolved problems are quantification method — how to assign a defensible score to a given change — and cross-domain comparison — how to weigh impact in one dimension against another. The provenance chains are specified but not yet cryptographically enforced, so present trust rests on disclosure and review rather than on tamper-proof records. These gaps are documented rather than hidden, and are the focus of ongoing work in the commons.