Governance
The rules no datum may violate
Verlumia is governed by five guiding principles. They are not a manifesto of values: they are constraints that every figure, page and decision must meet — and that can be audited.
Principles, not promises
An index's credibility is not declared, it is engineered. Verlumia deliberately separates who guards the method from who commercializes it, subjects every figure to five non-negotiable rules, and leaves a verifiable trail of every decision. What follows is how that scaffolding is built — and which parts are public and which are auditable on request.
The non-negotiables
No figure we publish is produced by a generative AI. AI helps us build and audit the system; the data comes from statistical code that anyone can reproduce.
AI was the scaffold. The building stands on its own.
The color teal signals one thing only: a measured, sealed datum. No other use is allowed — neither decorative nor for branding. It is a visual promise you can audit at a glance.
A survey or third-party datum is never painted teal.
Every figure is rebuilt step by step from its source, with a verifiable fingerprint. And auditability begins before the computation: we even publish which sources we discard and why.
From source selection to the figure, everything leaves a trail.
The public index does not score companies or people: it is published in aggregate at the system level, never per entity. Granular analytics is a separate line, commercial and audited separately.
We measure the phenomenon; we don't point at culprits.
We always distinguish actual results from hypothetical ones. A measured fact is not mixed with a projection; a data gap is declared openly, not forcibly filled.
We show the method; we don't boast about it.
"In an era flooded with machine-generated figures, measuring the truth and proving it with lineage is not a limitation — it is the differentiator."
Two entities, one boundary
Neutrality is not sustained by goodwill, it is sustained by structure. Verlumia operates as two entities with deliberately separated roles:
Guardian of the methodology and of neutrality. It does not pursue profit: it builds legitimacy. It owns the public index and the criterion.
Commercial development of derived products, under license from the Institute. This entity houses the per-entity granular analytics — contracted and audited separately.
The boundary rule is simple: what is public and free is neutral and aggregated; what names entities is commercial and audited apart. A single brand backs both, so a single reputational slip would stain them both — that's why the public index's independence is protected by design, not by promise.
How a decision is made — and checked
On what is shown and what is not, we have an explicit rule — neither everything nor nothing:
In public
- The five principles.
- The method, in plain language.
- The source criteria: included and discarded.
- The grade of evidence of every figure (A / B / C).
- The lineage of every figure: source, version and fingerprint.
Internal · auditable on request
- The full corpus of records and their hashes.
- The council's deliberations.
- Work in progress not yet sealed.
The discipline is "show, don't proclaim": we present the method plainly, never as a superlative. And a sequencing rule backs it — a source's record must be complete and current before we call it strong.
These five principles govern every figure, page and decision at Verlumia, and apply to every country that replicates the index. No urgency, convenience or AI suggestion is grounds to deviate from them: only a reasoned council record, with a name and a date.