The measured pilot: volunteering.

runward claims its artifacts make a repository materially cheaper for a stranger to take over. That claim has never been measured on a repository the maintainer did not write. Until it is, it is a thesis rather than a result — and this page exists to make it fall one way or the other.

What is already committed

The protocol is committed and dated before any data exists: docs/pilot-protocol.md, with its instruments in the repository, empty. The git history is the proof, and that is the whole point: a protocol written afterwards bends to the numbers.

Three things are frozen in it:

• The questionnaire — sixteen questions an inheritor or an auditor actually asks (where the load-bearing decisions are, how you restart it, who answers for what, what evidence exists that the declared rules were applied). The same sheet serves before and after: a sheet that moves between the two measures makes the numbers incomparable.
• Who scores — the volunteering team's engineer, never the runward maintainer. It is the thesis's own logic applied to us: a verdict is opposable only when the judged party does not manufacture the judge.
• The failure criterion, written in advance: if the artifacts do not reduce the count of unanswered questions, or if they cost more operator hours than they save, the pilot counts against the method and is published as such.

What it costs, and what it gives

The cost first: one engineer, up to 8 hours boxed, twice — once before, once after. That is the real price and it is not small. Nothing else is asked of you.

What you keep: a complete runward mission on your repository, free — the characterization, the retro-documented decisions, the evidence trail, the gate. MIT, yours, whatever the numbers say.

What gets published: both score sheets, the operator hours log, and the verdict. Named, or with your repository described only by size, stack and age if you prefer — you choose in the form, and that choice is not renegotiable afterwards.

The repository it takes

One the runward maintainer did not write: that is the single condition without which the measurement measures nothing. Brownfield, no production stakes required. A repository with no model or agent in it is perfectly fine — runward gates delivery decisions, and ordinary software simply exercises fewer craft rules.

Volunteering

Open the candidate form

It is a GitHub issue form, deliberately: runward operates no service and collects nothing, so the invitation runs on the same infrastructure as the rest of the project — a public repository. The questions are versioned beside the protocol, so they are pre-registered too: you read exactly what you will be asked before asking anything of us.