Most frameworks protect the author.
They're written to make the creator look smart, positioned behind a paywall or a consulting engagement, and conveniently light on examples where the approach didn't work.
GOVENANT is the opposite of that.
I published it on Zenodo — peer-indexed, open access, permanent DOI. CC BY 4.0 license. That means it's free. Forever. For you, for your portfolio companies, and yes, for my competitors too.
I made that choice deliberately. If AI governance is actually a problem worth solving — and I believe it is — then locking the solution behind a gate is just another form of the disease. Performed helpfulness. Motion without delivery.
But the part I'm most accountable to is this: I published my own audits.
Three of them. Public. Flatlined. Performed. Alive. Those aren't hypothetical case studies. They're real operational snapshots from inside the iii Partners agent system — what broke, what we caught, what we fixed, and what we're still watching. I didn't write a framework and then point at other people's failures. I put ours on the record first.
The structure itself is straightforward: four conformance levels, modeled on the same logic as WCAG for web accessibility. Not because AI governance is identical to accessibility — it isn't — but because the industry already knows how to think in conformance tiers. You don't need a new mental model. You need an honest logbook and a clear standard to measure against.
That's what GOVENANT is.
If this lands for you — if you've been thinking about how your fund evaluates AI accountability in the companies you back, or how you'd even begin to audit an agentic system before writing a check — I'd like to be in your network.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or reply directly to this email. No pitch. No calendar link. Just a real conversation if the timing is right.
And if you want to go deeper before that — my AI assistant at https://sfielder.com/talk?ref=nl learns about your situation first. It's how I make sure any time we spend together is actually worth yours.