07 — Boundaries, licensing and house style
This site has a licensing problem the other *.sgit.ai sites do not have, and it is worth getting right before the first page is written.
1. The CC BY / CC BY-SA collision
The estate publishes CC BY 4.0. The Wardley ecosystem publishes CC BY-SA 4.0. They are compatible for reading and incompatible for adapting.
ShareAlike is viral. Quote CC BY-SA material with attribution and nothing happens. Adapt it — rewrite, restructure, translate, build a derivative table from it — and the resulting page must itself be CC BY-SA 4.0. You cannot relicense someone else's adaptation as CC BY.
The rule for this site: CC BY-SA material appears as clearly-marked quotation and link-out, never as adaptation. Then every page stays CC BY 4.0 and the network's licence stays uniform.
Where you genuinely want to adapt — a rewritten doctrine list, a restructured climatic-patterns table — do it on a clearly-marked page carrying its own CC BY-SA 4.0 notice, and say why at the top. One or two such pages are fine. A site with a mixed and unlabelled licence is not.
Watch the 3.0/4.0 split. Simon Wardley's book and most of the ecosystem are CC BY-SA 4.0. His blog blog.gardeviance.org is CC BY-SA 3.0. These are different licences with different notices. Do not merge them into one footer.
Standard attribution string, used across the ecosystem:
Wardley Mapping is provided courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.
sources__industry-resources.json carries the correct string per resource; screenshots/targets.json carries the same strings attached to the capture targets so a screenshot and its credit can never drift apart.
2. What this site's own content is
Everything written for wardley-maps.sgit.ai — every page, /documents/, /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, the admin surfaces, this pack, and the four maps in maps/ — is CC BY 4.0, consistent with the rest of the network. Stamp every raw markdown document:
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).Run licence-audit.py (shipped in the graphs.sgit.ai pack) in --check mode as a CI gate so the stamp cannot drift.
The maps this pack ships are original works, drawn from this pack's own research. They are CC BY 4.0 and carry no ShareAlike obligation. The technique they use is Wardley's and should be credited as such — crediting a technique is courtesy and good practice, not a licence condition.
3. Do not publish
From the __Send corpus. These are not judgement calls — each names commercial terms, a competitor, a customer, or a private individual.
| Path | Reason |
|---|---|
library/alchemist/materials/ — the whole tree | Investor-grade commercial material: pricing (£5/500 credits, £49–999/month), customer count, burn, TAM, a named-competitor price table (Intralinks, Datasite), founder CV, pitch decks, revenue and competitive-positioning models. None of it is needed for a Wardley site. |
team/town-planner/roles/librarian/reviews/02/21/v0.5.8__review__cbr-investment-catalogue.md | Catalogues a separate company's private investment repository. Third-party commercial detail. |
team/town-planner/roles/alchemist/reviews/03/10/ — both files | Investor strategy and internal velocity metrics. |
…/07/17/commercial-model/v0.33.49__strategy-brief__sg-send-gen-ai-consulting-model…md | Contract structure, hourly rates, response-time price ladder, delivery location. Partial extraction allowed: the explorer→villager handover section (~2 paragraphs) and the Simon Wardley source citation are publishable; the commercial model is not. |
…/06/23/wardley-maps/…first-pass-eight-maps…md — Map 8 only | The competitive-landscape map attaches maturity judgements to living companies: "NHI security (Astrix, …)", "identity / PAM (Okta, CyberArk, Veza)", "agent observability (LangSmith, …)". Maps 1–7 and the cross-cutting reading are safe. Redact Map 8 or generalise it to categories. |
…/06/08/v0.33.2__research-brief__sg-send-tls-ssl-cybersecurity-skills-landscape.md | Names a private individual as a commercial target. The Wardley task inside it (Research Task 9) is safe in isolation; the surrounding brief is not. |
…/06/10/integration-landscape/…mappings-implementation-cost-criteria.md | Vendor-by-vendor cost and disposition scoring. The idea of a vendor evolution view is publishable; the scored table is not. |
…/05/26/v0.27.64__strategy-brief__sg-send-security-report-vault-demo-pentest.md | Pentest material. Only 4 Wardley mentions; not worth the risk. |
…/07/31/markets-and-field-demo/…somebody-has-to-be-the-villagers…md | Publishable with care. The Wardley/NFR argument is strong and belongs on the site. But the "one in five strategic dealmakers walked away" M&A figure and seven market statistics are loosely attributed ("reported", "is cited as finding"), and the brief itself flags that "much of what circulates is vendor commentary recycling a smaller set of underlying studies." Re-source or soften. |
Everything else in Tiers 0–1 of the manifest is clean, and most already carries the CC BY 4.0 stamp.
4. Third-party names — the line
Fine: naming a technique, a framework, a standard, or a tool. Naming Simon Wardley, Ben Mosior, Chris Daniel, Matt Edgar, Danny Buerkli, John Grant, Tristan Slominski and the other practitioners in 04__ — they are public authors of public work, credited for it.
Fine: saying MapKeep shut down on 30 May 2026 and crediting Tristan Slominski for building it. That is a factual, sourced obituary and the community needs it recorded.
Not fine: attaching maturity or capability judgements to named commercial competitors (Map 8), reproducing a vendor cost-scoring table, or naming a private individual as a commercial target.
Never: quoting Discord or forum members without consent. Those are personal messages regardless of technical accessibility.
5. Screenshot ethics
capture.js screenshots pages. Three rules:
- A page screenshot for identification is defensible almost everywhere, including ARR material — it is how a directory works. Clipping content out of a page is not. Never reproduce Xebia's diagrams, InfoQ's video frames, or GCATI's syllabus.
- The attribution string travels with the image. It is pre-written per target in
targets.json. Render it under the image, not in a global footer. - Publish
captured.json. Status, title, final URL, timestamp — for successes and failures alike. In an ecosystem where the canonical indexes point at dead tools, a screenshot without a provable date is worth much less than one with.
6. Network boundaries
| Site | Owns | This site defers on |
|---|---|---|
wardley-maps.sgit.ai | Mapping technique, doctrine, the PST pattern, the resource index, Dinis's mapping history | — |
graphs.sgit.ai | Graph theory, meaning through connectivity, G³, maps-as-graphs rendering methodology | Cross-link, don't duplicate. Its /v1/maps/ page is the methodology-and-inventory surface; this site is the technique surface. |
pki.sgit.ai | PKI, the registry MVP | Keeps the pack context; the doctrine page and both map pages move here with stubs |
risks.sgit.ai | Risk concepts, acceptance, the grounding ladder | Risk-as-an-evolution-axis is a shared idea — one link each way |
nhi.sgit.ai, sg-sentinel.sgit.ai | Non-human identity, sentinel | Should link here; currently mention Wardley zero times |
riskmandate.ai | Commercial | References, is not referenced |
sgit.ai | The vault product, the demos | Hosts the Strategy Maps vault and the two live demo pages; those stay |
7. House style
-ise, not-ize, throughout. The corpus mixes them freely; the site must not. One glossary line noting they are the same word.- Explorer / Villager / Town Planner for the agent teams, always paired with Wardley's originals on first use. Settler appears once in the entire corpus — do not adopt it.
- Quote generously and attribute exactly. The corpus's best lines are better than any paraphrase of them, and quotation is the licence-safe move anyway.
- Every map ships its source. No rendered image without the
.mmdnext to it. - Every resource page carries a verification date. No exceptions — it is the site's entire differentiator in that category.
- Name what would falsify a claim. A map is a claim; a page asserting one should say what evidence would change it.
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
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