About Dillweed®
A standards-oriented namespace and trust infrastructure project for portable agentic systems — focused on how agents discover, identify, trust, and revoke capabilities across organizational and provider boundaries.
The project explores a missing coordination layer beneath agent behavior — a layer concerned not with what an agent does after invocation, but with how it determines what it can find and trust in the first place.
What This Project Is
The Dillweed Namespace Project is a published body of technical and governance work addressing how agents discover and trust capabilities across organizational boundaries. It covers naming authority, trust-aware resolution, registry truth, cryptographic attestation, revocation, governance continuity, and observability for portable agentic systems.
It is intended as a contribution to pre-standardisation and standards-facing discussion in areas including trust management, digital identity, cross-domain interoperability, and neutral coordination infrastructure.
The project is independently operated and not affiliated with any platform provider. The domain dillweed.com has been under continuous independent single-owner stewardship since 1997, providing an unusual independent provenance basis for a neutral naming authority layer, while leaving formal multi-party governance evolution to the Governance Framework and Operations Charter.
A namespace operated by a major platform participant would face an unavoidable neutrality challenge, because the operator would simultaneously occupy two roles — provider of competing services and arbiter of discovery and trust policy among them — that the namespace's coordination function is structured to keep separate.
What Problem It Addresses
Most current AI governance and security approaches focus on what happens within a deployment: monitoring agent behavior, enforcing policy, or securing runtime execution. That work is necessary.
Dillweed focuses on a different question: how capabilities are discovered, attested, selected, and revoked before an agent invokes them — especially when multiple organizations, providers, or trust domains are involved.
As agents become persistent, stateful, and cross-domain entities, existing dependencies on hardcoded provider endpoints, proprietary registries, and single-platform identity systems create structural fragility in the trust layer. The underdeveloped infrastructure layer is no longer primarily model capability — it is stable naming authority, trust-aware resolution, durable registry truth, and neutral governance continuity.
Agent state can move across runtimes and administrative domains. Trust cannot move unless naming authority and attestation evidence move with it. The Dillweed stack is an architectural proposal for that missing layer.
What Is Published
The site includes a standards-facing overview and a set of linked specifications. These documents cover the namespace layer, resolver behavior, registry structure, governance framework, operational charter, observability plane, and continuity provisions.
Project Status
The Dillweed Namespace Stack is published as technical specifications, a governance framework, a DNSO operations charter, and a running Node.js reference implementation deployed on local infrastructure. All specification documents are publicly available at dillweed.com.
The reference implementation comprises three services running locally on Apple Silicon hardware under launchd auto-start, each passing the conformance test suite for its corresponding specification: the Registry reference implementation (v0.2.3, conformant with Registry Specification v0.1.3), the DillClaw™ Resolver reference implementation (v0.1.1, conformant with DillClaw Resolver Specification v0.1.3), and the Dillweed Anthill™ Observability Plane reference implementation (v0.1.1, conformant with Anthill Observability Plane Specification v0.1.2). Specification document versions and reference implementation versions are tracked independently; the implementation versions above refer to the Node.js code, not to the specification documents themselves. These services are not yet exposed as public production endpoints.
The DNSO public key is published at dillweed.com/dnso_public.pem (Ed25519). All currently published registry capability records are signed against this key and verifiable by any party.
The immediate objective is dialogue around trust management, governance neutrality, trust tier attestation models, and cross-domain naming authority for portable agent ecosystems. The founding-phase governance structure is explicitly designed to evolve toward multi-stakeholder institutional models as adoption develops.
Contact
For standards, architecture, or partnership inquiries, the Standards Overview provides the most complete introduction to the project's scope and technical approach.
Inquiries and engagement may be directed through dillweed.com.