KU / 01
KU
A context in which AI judges someone, as a student, employee, patient, borrower, customer, or citizen.
THE HUKUMU PROJECT
Tracking how AI judges humanity
Every day, AI systems score, rank, sort, and flag people: who gets the interview, the loan, the appointment, the scholarship. Most of those judgments leave no record anyone can find. The Hukumu Project is building open standards to change that.
01 / THE WHY
The problem
When a person decides something about you, there is usually a record and someone accountable. When an AI system does it, there is often neither. The people judged rarely know it happened. The organizations using AI often can't say how many such judgments they make, or where.
You can't govern what you can't see.THE IDEA
Transparency builds trust. Trust drives adoption.
We want AI to flourish. People embrace new technology when they can trust it, and they trust what they can see. Clear, consistent records of AI judgments help organizations earn that trust, so innovation can move forward with accountability instead of suspicion.
Transparency
Trust
Adoption
THE LANGUAGE
Three words, five thousand years old
Hukumu is the Swahili word for judgment, and hidden inside it is KU: Hu-KU-mu. We took our vocabulary from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer, a civilization that kept meticulous records of its transactions and decisions.
DAB / 02
DAB
The internal record an organization keeps of an AI judgment.
DIB / 03
DIB
The public disclosure of how AI judgment is used, usually system-level or aggregate, so no individual's case is made public.
Hukumu writes the standards. It never collects or holds anyone's records.
KU · DAB: two readings of one sign
Read the frameworkTHE PEOPLE
Built by the people it affects
What should be recorded, and what should be public, isn't a question for technologists alone. In each domain we convene the people judged and the organizations doing the judging to write the rules together.
A PUBLIC GOOD
Open by design
Everything the Hukumu Project produces is free for anyone to use, on the same terms for everyone. No organization, including any future commercial venture, gets privileged access.
Read our openness commitmentTAKE PART
Get involved
Whether you've been judged by an algorithm, build one, regulate one, or fund work like this, there's a place for you.