Trustmark Initiative

Welcome to the Trustmark Initiative

This site provides foundational guidance, technical specifications, and open-source tools to help communities and implementers adopt and operationalize the trustmark framework. Whether you are launching a new trust community, establishing organizational conformance to industry or community standards, conducting trust assessments, or publishing standards, this site provides the resources needed to implement trustmarks in scalable digital ecosystems.

Purpose of the Trustmark Initiative

The Trustmark Initiative exists to provide technical infrastructure and implementation support for communities that need to establish and maintain digital trust. It does not govern any specific community. Instead, its primary role is to support the formation and operation of autonomous trust communities by providing shared tools, specifications, and guidance.

The Trustmark Initiative:

  • Serves as the steward of the underlying trustmark infrastructure.
  • Supports the creation and instantiation of new communities of interest but does not play a governance role within any particular community.
  • Publishes high-level implementation guidance for all types of trustmark stakeholders.
  • Maintains the Trustmark Framework Technical Specification (TFTS) — a normative specification that defines the modular data models and core processes used within the trustmark framework.
  • Publishes and manages a suite of open-source trustmark software tools, including tools for authoring trust policies, assessing conformance to required specs and policies, publishing trustmarks, and verifying and monitoring trust relationships over time.

What Is the Trustmark Framework?

The trustmark framework enables communities of interest to define, publish, assess, and verify trust and interoperability requirements across digital ecosystems using modular, machine-readable artifacts known as trustmark definitions and trust interoperability profiles, along with structured assessment and validation processes. For a more detailed introduction to the trustmark framework — including its core concepts, modular structure, and roles — see the Trustmark Framework Fundamentals page.

Who Should Use This Site?

This site is designed to support all major types of trustmark implementers:

  • Communities of interest that wish to define and manage trust requirements across their digital participants.
  • Participating organizations within a community that must meet and assert conformance with trust and interoperability requirements in order to join or interoperate with partners in the community.
  • Auditors and assessors responsible for evaluating conformance against published trust criteria.
  • Standards publishers and standards development organizations that want to publish machine-readable, version-controlled representations of existing trust and technical standards.

Each of these roles is supported with tailored implementation guidance available in the Implementer Guidance section of the site.

Available Tools and Resources

This site provides links to the following primary resources:

Getting Started

If you are new to trustmarks, start with the Trustmark Framework Fundamentals page to understand how the framework works.

If you already know your role — whether you are a participating organization, a community administrator, an assessor, or a standards publisher — visit the Implementer Guidance page for detailed how-to content specific to your needs.

To see how others have used the trustmark framework in real-world contexts, visit the Trustmark Implementations page.