The cards

A tile is the visual identity of one skill set: a machined plate, two chamfered corners, a bevel lit at the top left, an inset scribe line, four countersunk marks. Never a tall chip with a white label strip.

Three things are always on it. The number, stamped across the plate, sector letter first. The collector's mark, a two-letter die at the top right — SE for Steady Eddie, SA for Strategic Agent. And a pattern, small and symmetric, drawn from the number itself. Even Steven owns what is made of every skill, and its mark, ES, sits on the tiles it collected.

Colour never carries meaning alone. Each family has a band of hues; a tile's colour is chosen at issue and recorded on its Card. A brand red is never issued as a fill. Below a certain width the name comes off before the number does; smaller again, the tile becomes a number-only chip.

One Card per edition, sealed when the edition is frozen. The Card page is its public side: number, edition and check character; name; sector, track, family and trade; status; scope; what it will be built from; how it will be tested, by method and never by result; what it refuses; the tiers on offer; the edition history.

Five lines sit above that detail, on every Card, on every track, in every sector.

Steady Eddie and Strategic Agent require skill sets. Even Steven owns them. Tacit Tessera licenses them to OEMs and to AI.

The name leads and the number sits beside it, never instead of it. Contributor identities, consent state and evaluation results are never on the public side, and neither is a real client, a real job number, a real rate, or any figure taken from an archive. No real person appears without a signed consent naming that exact use: every Card on this site is marked EXAMPLE and carries an invented name.

The empty state. Every entry today reads one word — Specified. Such a Card says what will be recorded, tested and refused, and shows no tier as available.

The Card is sealed, and its seal can be checked. The worked example is Marnie Thivierge — Dozer, mining, in the Tacit Tessera Book.

On the Records track a Source is one of two things: a named person's practice, or a company's records. Where it is a person, the person is named on the Card and the name stays on it. Strategic Agent captures the skill set of a professional from the corpus they retained over a career and mined into a reference.

The Card below is an illustration on this page and nowhere else: not an entry in the Book, and the register does not hold the number.

Nobody is interviewed and nobody is recorded to build a Records set. Her agreement is with Even Steven, and a withdrawal she makes there takes effect at the next serve. Where the Source is a company instead, the same Card reads with the company coded and never named.

The deck is the Book on paper: Letter portrait, six strips to a sheet, punched for a binder. A strip carries the tile at the left, then the number, the name, the collector and one line of scope. Each sheet is printed from a dated cut of the Book.

Three of the six strips a sheet carries; the printed sheet carries the mark at its head. Demo deck (PDF) — EXAMPLE.

The operator's card is wallet size, printed front and back. Tacit Tessera issues it.

The front puts the licence name first and largest, the tile and number beside it, then the family and trade, then two lines: Listed in the Tacit Tessera Book and Issued by Tacit Tessera. The back carries five sentences, the verify address as plain text, and a status true on the day.

It is not a credential. No rank, no level, no star, no badge, no word claiming the person has been graded. No operator number, no pay figure, no login link.

A printed card cannot be recalled: its authority is the verify page, never the plastic. The plate and the wallet card that go in the post when a skill set is issued are set out on the plate and the card.

Front and back, at trim size. Demo card (PDF) — EXAMPLE.

The certificate is Letter portrait, one sheet, and it is the paper a licensee files. It names the licensee, the skill set, the number, the edition pinned, the sector, the owner, the licence shape and the term. Pinning the edition is what makes a result reproducible years later.

What we stand behind is on the face of it: the money owed, the count, the deletion. It carries signature blocks for Tacit Source and for Even Steven, the seal line and the fine print, and never a price or a rate.

The printed sheet carries the mark at its head. Demo certificate (PDF) — EXAMPLE.