The Market

Recovering the value in an organization's own records is the first step. Beyond it, recovered records could become something that can be certified, valued, and exchanged.

Status A design, set out in a paper. Nothing on this page is built.

Two problems that meet

On one side, households and businesses pay to store or destroy records they cannot use, and the volume is about to rise as a generation's homes change hands. On the other, developers of AI systems, researchers, and analysts pay substantial sums for human-made material they cannot find anywhere else.

One side pays to get rid of records; the other pays to get them. What stands between them is trust. A buyer cannot price what it has not read, and an owner cannot sell what might expose the living people inside it.

How trust was built before

In the nineteenth century, grain became a commodity when it was sorted into published grades, inspected independently, and traded by receipt rather than by the sack. The same institutions could be adapted to records: published standards for a lot of recovered records, independent processing that removes identifying detail, certification, a receipt that changes hands, and a reserve that answers for what slips through.

Records are never identical the way grain is, so standards cannot make them interchangeable. They can make them comparable, and comparable is enough to price.

Questions it leaves open

• Who should write the standards, and how would anyone know they were not written for the writer?
• When the highest bid is to bury the work, who should decide?

Read the paper (opens in a new tab) · In the book: Chapter 12 and Appendix D