The Sondage Standard is the set of commitments, principles, and arguments that govern the work of legacy collection, analysis, and preservation. It is neither policy nor branding. It is the non-negotiable ground underneath every Sondage Season, every certified practitioner, and every archive accessioned. Four pages extend from this one, and readers serious about the project are encouraged to follow each in turn.

The Authentication Horizon and the Commingled Archive

The Authentication Horizon names the point past which no method can establish whether a biographical record was produced by a human being in genuine encounter with a life, or generated by a model operating on public data and statistical probability. Synthetic biography is already filling the archive of ordinary lives at scale, before any standard of provenance exists to constrain it. The record that process produces is what Sondage calls the Commingled Archive. That condition, and its consequences for conscious legacy in the synthetic age, is the reason for each of the foundational commitments below.

The Three Foundational Commitments

Sondage holds three commitments as non-negotiable. Human Authorship refuses AI in the collection, interpretation, and archiving of a primary source. Embodied Provenance binds every Season to a documented chain of human custody from the practitioner who conducted the inquiry to the archive that receives the record. Non-Custodial Sovereignty establishes that the archive belongs to the Senior Fellow from the moment of its production, with Sondage retaining no copy, no access, and no residual claim.

Stephen Mucher and the Founding of Sondage

Stephen Mucher, Ph.D., a social historian and former Dean and Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA, founded Sondage in 2025 after three decades working across oral history, Geragogy, and the institutions that have carried both traditions forward. The founder's page traces that lineage and the formation behind the Standard.

The Sondage Lexicon

Sondage operates inside a vocabulary built partly from the inherited language of archival science and historiography, and partly from coinages the synthetic era required. The Sondage Lexicon collects the working definitions of the Standard's terms. For any entry, the Lexicon is the canonical reference.

The Sondage Review

The Sondage Standard is a working document, not a finished one. The Sondage Review collects ongoing essays from the Founder and the appointed Guild, organized around the questions the Standard keeps having to answer as the synthetic era develops.